Here is a video of two prominent physics YouTubers talking to each other about the problems in fundamental physics, or the fundamental problems in physics. It’s a half hour long, and hosted by the Institute for Art and Ideas.
Watching this leads me to today’s rant. These are intelligent people who have been taught to be stupid. Indoctrination works.
Let’s begin with Bell’s strawman theory, AKA Bell’s inequality. This paper supposedly proves that theories of locally real, “hidden variable” particles are incompatible with experimental results. Balderdash! The paper contains not one but two baseless assumptions.
The paper insists that a “locally real” particle, when measured to have a spin in the “up” direction, is and was 100% up from the moment of creation.
The paper insists that the “locally real” entangled partner particle has a straight (linear) percentage chance, based on degrees off of “down”, of being detected as down. This looks like a triangle wave when plotted.
As Einstein supposedly said, opens paper to proper page and points, “We have no reason to believe any of this is true.”
These assumptions are not made for the particle using standard quantum mechanics. Bell made up these stipulations out of whole cloth. And they have gone mostly unchallenged for 60 years.
The spin of entangled particles is 180 degrees apart from the moment of their (very local) entangling. (90 degrees for photon polarization.) No more, no less. This is true no matter when or where you measure them. No spooky action at a distance required or allowed. We simply can’t know, even in principle, what the direction of spin of a particle is before we measure it. Naturally, our means of measuring the angle of spin alters it.
Measuring a particle depends upon the angle of the measuring device, in a very statistical way that follows a (non-linear) sine curve when plotted. Bell then goes on to decry, Lo, behold the inequality! A sine wave is different from a triangle wave, in an experimentally verifiable way!
The straw man is then beaten repeatedly over the following decades, resulting in the granting of the Nobel Prize to three physicists in 2022.
Millions of dollars and 60 years wasted punching a straw man.
Then there’s the entire topic of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. This isn’t physics. It’s not even science. It’s a weird cult religion that believes that at every moment, at every position, every possible outcome takes place, and an uncountable infinity of infinities of universes spawn. You, the person reading this, are a continuity of a consciousness flowing through a random assortment of realities as if it were merely a single reality.
As the saying goes, this is so bad it’s not even wrong. It’s category error. It takes a special kind of smart to come up with something this dumb. It takes a lot of dedicated propaganda and repeated programming to convince people of something this obviously silly.
Now I address the silverback gorilla in the physics department: measurement collapse.
A sensible explanation of quantum physics would have no problem explaining how results come to be, how effects proceed from causes. The Copenhagen interpretation has no such explanation beyond, “Shut up and calculate!”
This leads to rank nonsense like the utter confusion as to how measuring one slit of a double slit experiment interferes with the wave passing through both slits. The particle must have known before it reached the slits which one it would choose to go through!
It leads to the utterly preposterous conclusion that a particle takes every possible path on the way from here to there, and even the impossible ones. In order for a photon to interfere with itself, it must simultaneously travel at the speed of light, slower than that, and faster than that.
A few reminders about reality, for those who may have forgotten or never known:
You can’t measure a photon without destroying it.
You can’t measure an electron without significantly altering its momentum.
Mirrors work by absorbing photons and then emitting new ones.
Beam splitters work by being partial mirrors. Some photons are absorbed and re-emitted, while others pass straight (more or less) through.
Photon splitters work by absorbing a photon and then emitting a pair of entangled photons, each with half the energy.
Most of the “paradoxical” quantum experiment results you hear about come from ignoring these simple facts.
My take on things: The Casimir effect shows us the way. Waves of every allowable wavelength/frequency are constantly propagating through the quantum fields in every direction. Most of the time, these waves cancel out. When you place a barrier, only some of the waves propagate through, following their wave nature. These waves exist with or without the presence of particles, which generate their own waves. A constant random sloshing is the nature of reality.
These random waves are the cause most of the random nature of quantum mechanics. The waves of the appropriate wavelength gently nudge a (very real) particle as it moves, but these nudges mostly cancel each other out by being truly random. But in the presence of a barrier, wave action takes hold, and the waves become guides for the particle. There is nothing magical about this. The particle is that which we can measure. The particle exists at every point. The particle has a defined trajectory - which is inherently unpredictable.
Some physicists routinely state rampantly silly things like, “There is no such thing as time,” “The arrow of time is random and reversible,” and “There is no such thing as causation.” I like to tell these people I’m willing to sit down and have a rational debate with them on this topic at lunch last Thursday, as long as they’re buying.
My take flows from Rule Zero of physics: Everything adds up to nothing. I take this very seriously. The cosmology of this holds the Big Bang was a mirrored event, with our universe of positive time, positive energy, and matter flowing one way, our “Evil Twin” universe of negative time, negative energy, and antimatter flowing the other. I’m not the only one to come up with this idea.
My shorthand sheet for quantum particles uses time as a fundamental property, as this simplifies the calculations tremendously. Feynman was correct when he described antimatter as moving backwards through time - just not in the fashion he intended.
Time, by the way, has two separate meanings. Objective time, our universe’s arrow time and causality, flows at a steady pace. Yes, there is a universal “now”. However, every particle has its own subjective time (chrono charge, think of it as a kind of spin), as determined by relativity. So any two particles may (and probably will) disagree on what time “now” is. Especially given the restrictions of the speed of causation, AKA the speed of light in a vacuum, AKA the rate at which change in a quantum field propagates.
And then there’s string theory. This isn’t physics. This is mathematical masturbation. String theory was proven 30 years ago to be unprovable. Thousands of minds have wasted decades chasing this rabbit down the hole into a mathemagical Wonderland.
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