The metaphysics of physics

I added a very last paper to my list on ResearchGate. Its title is: what about multi-charge Zitterbewegung models? Indeed, if this local and realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is to break through, then it is logical to wonder about a generalization of a model involving only one charge: think of an electron (e.g., Consa, 2018) or proton model (e.g., Vassallo & Kovacs, 2023) here. With a generalization, we do not mean some unique general solution for all motion, but just what would result from combining 1-charge models into structures with two or more charges. [Just to be sure, we are not talking about electron orbitals here: Schrödinger’s equation models these sufficiently well. No. We are talking about the possible equations of motion of the charges in a neutron, the deuteron nucleus, and a helium-3 or helium-4 nucleus.]

So our question in this paper is this: how do we build the real world from elementary electron and proton particle models? We speculate about that using our own simplified models, which boil down to two geometrical elements: (i) the planar or 2D ring current of the zbw electron, and (ii) the three-dimensional Lissajous trajectory on a sphere which we think might make sense when modeling the orbital of the zbw charge in a proton. Both have the advantage they involve only one frequency rather than the two frequencies (or two modes of oscillation) one sees in helical or toroidal models. Why do we prefer to stick to the idea of one frequency only, even if we readily admit helical or toroidal models are far more precise in terms of generating the experimentally measured value of the magnetic moment of electrons and protons, respectively? The answer is simple: I am just an amateur and so I like to roll with very simple things when trying to tackle something difficult. 🙂

So, go and have a look at our reflections on multi-charge Zitterbewegung models – if only because we also started writing about the history of the Zitterbewegung interpretation and a few other things. To sum it up:

  1. The paper offers a new brief history of how interpretations of the new quantum physics evolved, and why I am with Schrödinger’s Zitterbewegung hypothesis: it just explains the (possible) structure of elementary particles so well.
  2. It speculates about how positive and negative charge may combine in a neutron, and then also about how a deuteron nucleus might look like.
  3. We did not get to specific suggestions for helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei because these depend on how you think about the neutron and the deuteron nucleus. However, I do spell out why and how about I think of a neutron playing the role I think it plays in a nucleus: the glue that holds protons together (so there is no need for quark-gluon theory, I think, even if I do acknowledge the value of some triadic color scheme on top of the classical quantum numbers).
  4. Indeed, despite my aversion of the new metaphysics that crept into physics in the 1970s, I explain why the idea of some color typing (not a color charge but just an extra triadic classification of charge) might still be useful. [I secretly hope this may help me to understand why this color scheme was introduced in the 1970s, because I do not see it as anything more than mathematical factoring of matrix equations describing disequilibrium states – which may be impossible to solve.]

Have a look, even if it is only to appreciate some of the 3D images of what I think as elementary equations of motion (I copy some below). I should do more with these images. Some art, perhaps, using OpenAI’s DALL·E image generator. Who knows: perhaps AI may, one day, solve the n-body problems I write about and, thereby, come up with the ultimate interpretation of quantum mechanics?

That sounds crazy but, from one or two conversations (with real people), it looks like I am not alone with that idea. 🙂 There are good reasons why CERN turned to AI a few years ago: for the time being, they use it to detect anomalies in the jets that come out of high-energy collissions, but – who knows? – perhaps a more advanced AI Logic Theorist programme could simplify the rather messy quark-gluon hypothesis some day?

Because I am disengaging from this field (it is mentally exhausting, and one gets stuck rather quickly), I surely hope so.

Using AI to find the equations of motion for my Zitterbewegung model of a proton?

The 3D Lissajous loop as a natural extension of a circular loop

Pre-scriptum (the day after, 9/11): I woke up this morning and thought: all I need to do is to prove the angular velocity is a constant for my model to work. So I did that, and it works (see my Bamboo notes below and https://www.desmos.com/3d/k1vargdjcc). This trajectory is a nice yin-yang trajectory (I am thinking about someone in Taiwan here, who contacted me recently with a model involving yin-yang symbolism, so I like that). I also packed it into yet another ResearchGate paper (link here: An Equation of Motion for the Zitterbewegung proton), which is much more precise and – hopefully – more convincing that the video.

For this kind of thinking or problem solving, I guess I am still better than ChatGPT-4. 🙂 ChatGPT-4 did pass ‘my’ Turing test on intelligence, however. And that is quite something. I write about the ouch! factor in my recent LinkedIn article on AI. Yesterday, I definitely had such ouch! feeling (gentle – just in the sense that I thought ChatGPT-4 was smarter than me on this too), but so it’s OK now. 🙂 I win. A nice thing about this simple calculation is that this SQRT(2) factor pops up: it must be the same SQRT(2) factor that is related to the magnetic moment of a proton in my proton radius derivation, although I am not yet sure why and how exactly.

I did a quick video on it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HnaLG8bY6o. Unfortunately, I cannot extract a transcript from it for ChatGPT-4. However, I had a quick conversation with it on what remains to be done, and that is to calculate the magnetic moment of this 3D Lissajous loop (it will depend on the orientation but we just need it in one direction: where it is strongest because that is how it will line up in a Penning trap of whatever device that is/was used to determine its value). I asked ChatGPT how it could possibly help with these calculations, mentioning the Biot-Savart law and the 3D integrals this would imply. This was ChatGPT’s answer:

“Regarding the Biot-Savart law and calculating the magnetic moment for such a complex 3D current loop, you’re correct that this involves intricate 3D integrals. I can certainly help set up or guide through parts of the calculation, especially in formulating the integral and explaining how to approach the problem. If you share the specifics of your current loop’s geometry and the required variables, we can work through how to structure the integrals needed for the magnetic moment calculation. Feel free to provide details if you want to give this a try!”

AI is, clearly, not was it was even just a year ago: it is much better now. As for me, I will let the problem rest now. 🙂

Pre-scriptum 2 (18 September): Please do check out the comment from the ‘Physics Detective’ to this post (and the Physics Detective site itself, of course): a Möbius ring for the electron and – who knows – a 3D trefoil loop for the proton might do the trick in 2D/3D as well. It would be nice if it did because it would bring helical/toroidal/solenoid-like spin of the charge itself into the model, possibly unifying the math behind these models. Thank you for noting this, John ! 🙂

Original post (9/10):

End of last year, I started to play with ChatGPT-4. Only a few times, really, because, for ordinary questions or web searches, it is not much better than your Google AI assistant or Microsoft’s CoPilot: it just comes with a very pleasant style of conversation (yes). I counted and, so far, I only five conversations with it. However, I do admit I have a habit of continuing an old conversation (ChatGPT now uses your old conversations anyway). Also, these five conversations were good and long. It helped me, for example, greatly to get a quick overview and understanding of IT product offerings in the cloud: it made/makes great comparisons between the offerings of Google Cloud, Azure and AWS, not only for infrastructure but also in the area of modern AI applications. I also asked questions on other technical things, like object-oriented programming, and in this field also it really excels at giving you very precise and relevant answers. In fact, I now understand why many programmers turn to it to write code. 🙂

However, I was mainly interested in ChatGPT-4 because it knows how to parse (read: it can read) documents now. So it does a lot more than just scraping things on products and services from websites. To be precise, it does not just parse text only: it actually ‘understands’ complex mathematical formulas and advanced symbols (think of differential operators here), and so that’s what I wanted to use it for. Indeed, I asked it to read my papers on ResearchGate and, because I do think I should rewrite and restructure them (too many of them cover more or less the same topic), I asked it to rewrite some of them. However, I was very dissatisfied with the result, and so the versions on RG are still the versions that I wrote: no change by AI whatsoever. Just in case you wonder. 🙂

The point is this: I am not ashamed to (a) admit I did that and (b) to share the link of the conversation here, which shows you that I got a bit impatient and why and how I left that conversation last year. I simply thought ChatGPT-4 did not have a clue about what I was writing about. So… It did not pass my Turing test on this particular topic, and that was that. Again: this was about a year ago. So what happened now?

I have a bit of time on my hands currently, and so I revisited some of my research in this very weird field. In fact, I was thinking about one problem about my Zitterbewegung proton model which I can’t solve. It bothers me. It is this: I am happy with my proton model – which is an exceedingly simple 3D elementary particle model, but I want the equations of motion for it. Yes. It is simple. It is what Dirac said: if you don’t have the equations of motion, you have nothing. That’s physics, and the problem with modern or mainstream quantum mechanics (the Bohr-Heisenberg interpretation, basically: the idea that probabilities cannot be further explained) is because it forgets about that. It dissatisfies not only me but anyone with common sense, I think. 😉 So I want these equations of motion. I have them for an electron (simple ring current), and now I hope to see them – one day, at least – for the proton also. [I am actually not too worried about it because others have developed such equations of motion already. However, such models (e.g., Vassallo and Kovacs, 2023) are, usually, toroidal and, therefore, involve two frequencies rather than just one. They are also not what I’d refer to as pure mass-without-mass models. Hence, they do not look so nice – geometrically speaking – to me as my own spherical model.

But so I do not have equations of motion for my model. This very particular problem should be rather straightforward but it is not: 3D motion is far more complex than 2D motion. Calculating a magnetic moment for (i) a simple ring current or for (ii) a very complex motion of charge in three dimensions are two very different things. The first is easy. The second is incredibly complicated. So, I am happy that my paper on my primitive efforts to find something better (I call it the “proton yarnball puzzle”) attracted almost no readers, because it is an awful paper, indeed! It rambles about me trying this or that, and it is full of quick-and-dirty screenshots from the free online Desmos 3D graphing calculator – which I find great to quickly get a visual on something that moves around in two or in three dimensions. But so whatever I try, it explains, basically, nothing: my only real result is nothing more than a Lissajous curve in three dimensions (you can look at it on this shared Desmos link). So, yes: poor result. Bad. That is all that I have despite spending many sleepness nights and long weekends trying to come up with something better.

It is already something, of course: it confirms my intuition that trajectories involving only one frequency (unlike toroidal models) are easy to model. But it is a very far cry from doing what I should be doing, and that is to calculate how this single frequency and/or angular and tangential velocity (the zbw charge goes at the speed of light, but the direction of its travel changes, so we effectively need to think of c as a vector quantity here) translates into frequencies for the polar and azimuthal angles we would associate with a pointlike charge zipping around on a spherical surface.

Needless to say, the necessary formulas are there: you can google them. For example, I like the presentation of dynamics by Matthew West of Illinois: clear and straightforward. But so how should I apply these to my problem? Working with those formulas is not all that easy. Something inside of me says I must incorporate the math of those Lissajous curves, but have a look at: that’s not the easiest math, either! To make a long story short, I thought that, one year later, I might try to have a chat with ChatGPT-4 again. This time around, I was very focused on this only, and I took my time to very clearly write out what I wanted it to solve for me. Have a look at the latter part of the chat in the link to the chat. So… What was the result of this new chat with GPT-4?

It did not give me any immediate and obvious analytical solution to my question. No. I also did not expect that. There are modeling choices to be made and all that. As I mention above, simple things may not be easy. Think of modeling a three-body problem, for example: this too has no closed-form solution, and that is strange. However, while – I repeat – it was not able to generate some easy orbitals for a pointlike charge whizzing around on a surface, I was very happy with the conversation, because I noted two things that are very different from last year’s conversation:

  1. ChatGPT-4 now perfectly understands what I am talking about. In fact, I accidentally pressed enter even before I finished writing something, and it perfectly anticipated what I wanted to tell it so as to make sure it would ‘understand’ what I was asking. So that is amazing. It is still ChatGPT-4, just like last year, but I just felt it had become much smarter. [Of course, it is also possible that I want just too impatient and too harsh with it last year, but I do not think so: ChatGPT learns, obviously, so it does get better and better at what it does.]
  2. In terms of a way forward, it did not come up with an immediate solution. I had not expected that. But it gently explained the options (which, of course, all amount to the same: I need to use these dynamical equations and make some assumptions to simplify here and there, and then see what comes out of it) and, from that explanation, I again had the feeling it ‘knew’ what it was talking about it.

So, no solution. Yes. I would say: no solution yet. But I think I probably can come up with some contour of a solution, and I have a feeling ChatGPT-4 might be able to fill in the nitty-gritty of the math behind it. So I should think of presenting some options to it. One thing is sure: ChatGPT-4 has come a long way in terms of understanding abstruse or abstract theories, such as this non-mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics: the Zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum mechanics (see the Zitter Institute for more resources). So, as far as I am concerned, it is not “non-mainstream” anymore. Moreover, it is, of course, the only right interpretation of quantum mechanics. […] Now that I think of it, I should tell that to ChatGPT-4 too next time. 🙂

Post scriptum: For those who wonder, I shared the Desmos link with ChatGPT also, and it is not able to ‘see’ what is there. However, I copied the equation into the chat and, based on its knowledge of what Desmos does and does not, it immediately ‘knew’ what I was trying to do. That is pretty impressive, if you ask me ! I mean… How easy is it to talk to friends and acquaintances about topics like this? Pretty tough comparison, isn’t it? 🙂

As for ‘my’ problem, I consider it solved. I invite anyone reading this to work out more detail (like the precessional motion which makes the trajectory go all over the sphere instead of just one quadrant of it). If I would be a PhD student in physics, it’s the topic I’d pick. But then I am not a PhD student, and I do plan to busy my mind with other things from now on, like I wrote so clearly in my other post scriptum. 🙂

Post scriptum

A researcher I was in touch with a few years ago sent me a link to the (virtual) Zitter Institute: https://www.zitter-institute.org/. It is a network and resource center for non-mainstream physicists who succesfully explored – and keep exploring, of course – local/realist interpretations of quantum mechanics by going back to Schrödinger’s original and alternative interpretation of what an electron actually is: a pointlike (but not infinitesimally small) charge orbiting around in circular motion, with:

(i) the trajectory of its motion being determined by the Planck-Einstein relation, and

(ii) an energy – given by Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation – which perfectly fits Wheeler’s “mass-without-mass” idea.

I started exploring Schrödinger’s hypothesis myself about ten years ago – as a full-blown alternative to the Bohr-Heisenberg interpretation of quantum mechanics (which I think of as metaphysical humbug, just like Einstein and H.A. Lorentz at the time) – and consistently blogged and published about it: here on this website, and then on viXra, Academia and, since 2020, ResearchGate. So I checked out this new site, and I see the founding members added my blog site as a resource to their project list.

[…]

I am amazingly pleased with that. I mean… My work is much simpler than that of, say, Dr. John G. Williamson (CERN/Philips Research Laboratories/Glasgow University) and Dr. Martin B. van der Mark (Philips Research Laboratories), who created the Quantum Bicycle Society (https://quicycle.com/).

So… Have a look – not at my site (I think I did not finish the work I started) but at the other resources of this new Institute: it looks like this realist and local interpretation of quantum mechanics is no longer non-mainstream… Sweet ! It makes me feel the effort I put into all of this has paid off ! 😉 Moreover, some of my early papers (2018-2020) are listed as useful papers to read. I think that is better than being published in some obscure journal. 🙂

I repeat again: my own research interest has shifted to computer science, logic and artificial intelligence now (you will see recent papers on my RG site are all about that now). It is just so much more fun and it also lines up better with my day job as a freelance IT project manager. So, yes, it is goodbye – but I am happy I can now refer all queries about my particle models and this grand synthesis between old and new quantum mechanics to the Zitter Institute.

It’s really nice: I have been in touch with about half of the founding members of this Institute over the past ten years – casually or in a more sustained way while discussing this or that 2D or 3D model of an electron, proton, or neutron), and they are all great and amazing researchers because they look for truth in science and are very much aware of this weird tendency of modern-day quantum scientists turning their ideas into best-sellers perpetuating myths and mysteries. [I am not only thinking of the endless stream of books from authors like Roger Penrose (the domain for this blog was, originally, reading Penrose rather than reading Feynman) or Graham Greene here, but also of what I now think of rather useless MIT or edX online introductions to quantum physics and quantum math.]

[…]

Looking at the website, I see the engine behind it: Dr. Oliver Consa. I was in touch with him too. He drew my attention to remarkable flip-flop articles such as William Lamb’s anti-photon article (it is an article which everyone should read, I think: unfortunately, you have to pay for it) and remarkable interviews with Freeman Dyson. Talking of the latter (I think of as “the Wolfgang Pauli of the third generation of quantum physicists” because he helped so many others to get a Nobel Prize before he got one – Dyson never got a Nobel Prize, by the way), this is one of these interviews you should watch: just four years before he would die from old age, Freeman Dyson plainly admits QED and QFT is a totally unproductive approach: a “dead end” as Dyson calls it.

So, yes, I am very pleased and happy. It makes me feel my sleepness nights and hard weekend work over the past decade on this has not been in vain ! Paraphrasing Dyson in the above-mentioned video interview, I’d say: “It is the end of the story, and that particular illumination was a very joyful time.” 🙂

Thank you, Dr. Consa. Thank you, Dr. Vassallo, Dr. Burinskii, Dr. Meulenberg, Dr. Kovacs, and – of course – Dr. Hestenes – who single-handedly revived the Zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1990s. I am sure I forgot to mention some people. Sorry for that. I will wrap up my post here by saying a few more words about David Hestenes.

I really admire him deeply. Moving away from the topic of high-brow quantum theory, I think his efforts to reform K-12 education in math and physics is even more remarkable than the new space-time algebra (STA) he invented. I am 55 years old and so I know all about the small and pleasant burden to help kids with math and statistics in secondary school and at university: the way teachers now have to convey math and physics to kids now is plain dreadful. I hope it will get better. It has to. If the US and the EU want to keep leading in research, then STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) needs a thorough reform. :-/

And the dark force strikes again…

I do not know if it is funny or sad: the dark force struck again. As should be obvious from all of my recent posts, I do my utmost to refer very objectively to what’s in Feynman’s Lectures, and what makes sense in them, and what does not. I started this blog more than ten years – before Feynman’s Lectures went online – and one of my brothers (a university professor in Cape Town) also thought my blog is actually an encouragement for readers to buy Feynman’s Lectures. But… Well… No. One is, apparently, not allowed to disagree with Bill Gates’ or MIT’s view of Feynman’s legacy: he was right, and everyone else is wrong. So… A video of mine on that got ‘struck’ and was taken offline. :-/

Hmmm… The experience reminds of my efforts to try to engage with the Wikipedia authors and editors, which yielded no result whatsoever. I am not mainstream, obviously, and any edits I suggest are ruled out in advance. […] I am simplifying a bit, but that was, basically, my experience when trying to help rework the Wikipedia article on the Zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum physics. Funnily enough, I get all these advertisements begging me to donate to Wikipedia: I would actually do that if the process of trying to add or edit would have been somewhat friendlier.

In any case, it made me post my very last video on YouTube. The pdf-file I used to prepare for it, is on ResearchGate, which I warmly recommend as – probably – the only open science forum where you can publish working papers or presentations without any backlash. I can only hope it will stay that way. :-/ With all what is going on (I am appalled by the misinformation on the Ukraine war, for example), nothing is sure, it seems…

Post scriptum (2 May 2024): Because I had put a fair amount of work and preparation in it, I edited out Feynman’s Lectures and published it again. I hope it does not make Mr. Gottlieb angry again. 🙂 If it would, then… Well… Then I hope he finds peace of mind some other day.

19 May 2024: To be frank, things like this do shock me. Fortunately, this weekend is party time in Brussels (it is the ‘Pride’ weekend, and the atmosphere is very festive in the center here, where I live). It encouraged me to do some more videos. Different ones. Fun ones: just taking my Wacom tablet and jotting down stuff and talking about it without any preparation and with some nice Belgian beer on the side. Surprisingly, they got hundreds of views. See, for example, this talk about why I do not believe in a strong force or color charges, or this talk on the one-photon Mach-Zehnder experiment which figures so prominently in the MIT-edX course on QM. Also, I do not know if it is coincidence, but I got a surge in recommendations on my Principles of Physics paper on ResearchGate. I wrote that paper as a kind of manifesto. Not as some kind of “here you go: this is the explanation” thing. So I am happy that paper is going well: keep thinking for yourself. 🙂

The metaphysics of physics: final thoughts

I wrote my last post here two months ago and so, yes, I feel I have done a good job of ‘switching off’. I have to: I’ve started a new and pretty consuming job as ICT project manager. 🙂

Before starting work, I did take a relaxing break: I went to Barcelona and read quite a few books and, no, no books on quantum physics. Historical and other things are more fun and give you less of a headache.

However, having said that, the peace and quiet did lead to some kind of ‘final thoughts’ on the ‘metaphysics of physics’, and I also did what I never did in regard to my intuition that dark matter/energy might be explained by some kind of ‘mirror force’: the electromagnetic force as it appears in a mirror image. Not much change in the math, but physical left- and right-hand rules for magnetic effects that just swap for each other.

You can find the results of that in a very concise (four pages only) paper on my ResearchGate site, and also in two lectures (each a bit more than one hour) on my YouTube channel. The first video focuses on ‘big questions’, while the second one talks about this ‘mirror’ force (I previously referred to it as a ‘anti-force’ but I realize that’s not a good term), and on how that would fit with Maxwell’s equations (including Maxwell’s equation written in four-vector algebra).

Have fun and keep thinking. Most importantly: keep thinking for yourself ! Do not take anything for granted in this brave new world. 🙂

[A]Symmetries in Nature

I find that just working off some notes from my tablet and talking about them works better for me than writing elaborate papers. Boileau: “Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.” I did five new lectures in just one week on my YouTube channel. Have a look at the last one: symmetries and asymmetries in Nature.

It takes an easy-to-understand look at CP- and CPT-symmetry (and the related processes that sometimes break these symmetries) by thinking about what particles actually are: not infinitesimally small, but charged oscillations with a 2D or 3D structure. We also revisit the inherent mass-generating mechanism, which explains all mass in terms of electromagnetic mass.

We talked about CP- and CPT-symmetries before – back in 2014, to be very precise – but then I did not know what I know now, and those older posts also suffered from the 2020 attack by the dark force. 🙂 Briefly, what you should take away from it, is that the most fundamental asymmetry in Nature is this: the asymmetry in the electromagnetic force or field itself. It is that 90 degree phase difference (or ‘lag’) between the electric and magnetic field vectors. That explains why mirror images cannot be real, and it also explains why some processes go one way only. So… Another mystery solved ! I call it “the fallacy of CPT arguments.” 🙂

Post scriptum: I also wrapped up my YouTube ‘Schrödinger’s cat is dead’ series. For those who do not like the theoretical aspects of all these things, have a look at the last one (on pair creation-annihilation and intermediate vector bosons), in which I discuss the two interpretations (mainstream versus my classical perspective) one can have when looking at this wonderful world. I wrote this comment on it, which is probably my farewell to this hobby of mine:

For those who struggle with this, the key to understanding it all, is to understand that the superposition principle works for fields, but not for charges. That is also the key to understanding Bose-Einstein statistics, Fermi-Dirac statistics and – at larger scales – the ‘real world’ Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics (which combine both). See: https://readingfeynman.org/2015/07/21/maxwell-boltzmann-bose-einstein-and-fermi-dirac-statistics/. Always do a good dimensional analysis of the equations: distinguish real physical dimensions from purely mathematical ones: do not add apples and oranges. Distinguish potential or field strengths from real forces and actual energy (a force acting on a charge over some distance). That is why charges should not ‘vanish’ in the analysis, and it is also why i*pi and -i*pi are not ‘common phase factors’ which vanish against each other (both are equal to -1, right?) in equations involving wavefunctions. A positive charge zittering around in one direction is not the same as a negative charge zittering around in the other direction. Neutral particles are either real photons (which carry no charge whatsoever) or, else, neutral matter-particles. Applying the saying that was looks and quacks like a duck must be a duck, we might say most of these neutral particles will look like ordinary matter. Some, however, will look like light-like or be photon-like because they travel at or near the speed of light (the orbital motion of the two charges has vanished and so there is zero angular momentum). That does not mean they are photons. Also do not worry about wave equations when you prefer to think in terms of wavefunctions: wavefunctions are the real thing, not wave equations (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341269271_De_Broglie’s_matter-wave_concept_and_issues and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342424980_Feynman’s_Time_Machine). If you think otherwise, that is fine. Everyone looks for the Holy Grail, and you may be amongst those who think they have found it. If it is looks very different from the Holy Grail that I have finally found, that is OK. Jesus might have left more than one Holy Grail – fake or real ones – and just be happy with yours ! I will end this short illustrated Guide to the Universe with the Looney Tunes sign-off: “That’s All, Folks!”

Jean Louis Van Belle

Looking back, and ahead…

I started this blog on physics a bit more than a decade ago. It was then titled ‘Reading Penrose’s Road to Reality‘ (or something similar). I soon realized Penrose is/was just rambling, as evidenced by his latest theory relating quantum physics to consciousness. The only difference between Penrose and a weird physics teacher in Santa Barbara who tried to convince me of the existence of microgeons with in-built conscience is that Penrose had a rather distinguished career before he came up with all of this nonsense.

I am done with physics. I studied economics as a student. It was the only university study my father would let me do: he wanted me to do something useful and, looking back, he was right and made the right choice for me. One can study philosophy and physics as a hobby, which I did (I got a degree in philosophy but, because of my controversial take on the science of physics, I do not have the patience to get a degree in physics).

I think I have pushed it as far as a human being possibly can. Not economics, but physics is the ‘dismal science‘ nowadays. The Nobel Prize committee has played a very sad role in promoting theories that cannot be proved, but call for ever larger investments in huge technical facilities, such as CERN (very useful) or ITER (not useful at all). Today, I just stopped working on a paper challenging the usefulness of the concept of intermediate vector bosons. Then I thought: it is no use. It is like taking to the streets against the Gaza crisis, which a lot of people are doing but with no result in terms of making politicians change their mind.

So, I just put it online (there are no dark forces on ResearchGate), and then people can think about it and make up their own mind. I quoted Boltzmann a couple of times over the past few years: “Bring forth what is true. Write it so it it’s clear. Defend it to your last breath.” I do not have the required energy to do the latter bit: defending something – even if it is truth – to one’s last breath is not a recipe for good mental and physical health, and surely not for happiness.

We should go with the flow and take care of the ones that are near to us. I want to re-connect with my body. I am 54 years old now, and it is time to stop thinking and just work on technical things (I am an ICT consultant, after all). That will make me happy, and so that is what I am going to do.

[…]

I am happy I read the originals: Einstein in German, de Broglie in French and, of course, all of the Solvay papers. I am very grateful to my Jesuit professors – who taught me not only economics, but also math and philosphy – for having put up with me thirty years ago, and always insisted I should read great thinkers in the language that they were using to write up their great works. [I now think that is the only reason they let me pass, because I tended to disagree on everything else they were trying to teach me.]

It makes me think that modern education (with its emphasis on using AI and the incredible repository of knowledge on the web) is great but, frankly, I think the younger generation should do a lot more slow and deep reading: Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Ryle, and yes: Schrödinger, Einstein and Maurice/Louis de Broglie. I can only provide some pointers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341269271_De_Broglie’s_matter-wave_concept_and_issues. The Universe is simple and most wonderful at the same time.

As for the best quote of all times, I think it must be what Keynes famously said: “You can bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink.” [This is a proverb that goes back to the 12th century, apparently.] 🙂

Post scriptum: I baptized the paper on intermediate vector bosons – a pure fiction of the mind, if you ask me – Mystery 101. I thought it was a fun title, so I also wrote a Mystery 102 paper. That one takes a jab at myself. Indeed, when everything is said and done, one should not criticize others if you cannot criticize yourself, can you? 🙂 It is on my proton model: all equations make sense and yield the measurements or results that one wants out of such models, but – for some reason – I did not find a ‘Royal Road‘ to its equations of motion. Not yet. I am not so worried about that. Perhaps it is like the two-body problem: there may be no analytical solution. The interesting thing is that I now think the trajectory of the proton’s Zitterbewegung charge might not be on some spherical surface, but on a sphere turned inside out: like a double-conical structure or something. Who knows? 🙂

Can matter be made out of light?

I wanted to update my thoughts on this obvious but intriguing and – you may be surprised to hear this – basically unanswered question in phyics: can matter be created out of light? If so, where does the charge come from? Or the reverse: in matter-antimatter pair annihilation, where does the charge go?

So, I revisited and updated Lecture XIII and Lecture XI on that: two papers in what I, with a wink to the title of Richard Feynman’s rather famous Lectures on Physics (which inspired this blog many years ago – not anymore) , wrote as part of a series in which I try to make things that are not so obvious – because couched in guru-speak – somewhat more obvious: what are the actual experiments and what are the possible interpretations? I also opened a discussion thread on the question on ResearchGate. That was useful and not-so-useful at the same time. Let me elaborate:

1. It was useful because:

  • It forced me to ask a very precise question so as to get input from other researchers: no philosophy. Only tough and precise discussion.
  • I did get references to other experiments than the ones I had looked at.

2. It was not-so-useful because:

  • I found myself re-explaining very basic physics while ‘talking’ to people with very different backgrounds. One of those questions was a weird discussion on what a real photon actually is: something with no rest mass whatsoever. To my surprise, one of the researchers does support the thesis slow-moving or massive neutral particles might be photons (or whatever other field you might think of).
  • The format of these discussions is – in no way whatsoever – a substitute to good, detailed and precise email exchanges with colleagues whom you know and who are at your level of understanding. I guess such email exchanges are the only true equivalent of the long letters physicists used to write to each other about hundred years ago.

It made me realize why thinking and writing about physics and the metaphysics that come with it is a rather lonely and somewhat depressing intellectual pursuit. You think about very difficult issues for which there may or may not a solution. That is stressful enough already. It becomes even more stressful when you think you found an answer or a solution to a problem but that, apparently, you are not able to communicate it clearly or – much more likely – no one is interested in your views. 🙂 Another possibility is that – all of a sudden – you realize that you missed some obvious fact, or that an entirely different interpretation of what might be the case is also possible. So, then, you have to start from scratch again. That is very tiring. Mental.

I think I am fortunate because I am an amateur physicist only and – on top of that – I do not take myself very seriously any more. Not on these questions, at least. 🙂

Cold and hot fusion

Just two or three news items:

  1. The UK stopped its JET nuclear fusion programme. It is unclear whether some other programme will follow it. I find it significant that the UK did not decide to join the ITER project. I am a non-believer, so I interpret it as well-founded skepticism. Recreating the conditions that prevail in the Sun is probably not possible on Earth. Maybe it will be possible 100 years from now. 🙂
  2. One of Europe’s leading cold fusion scientists – cold fusion hardly gets any attention nowadays – updated an overview article on experimental results in the field of cold fusion (yes, I know this is totally unrelated to hot fusion, but so here we are). I should read it, but time and energy are limited in a man’s life, and I think I should bring this hobby of mine to a close.
  3. I launched a ‘discussion thread’ on light-matter conversion on RG. There is good stuff on that. I remain skeptical on ‘photonic’ or ‘charge-without-charge’ models, however. I am surprised Dr. Hestenes gives this a lot of credibility so, perhaps, I should change my mind on it. This ‘Quantum Bicycle Society‘ is quite interesting (and counts very respectable scientists in its ranks) and (also) seems to advocate for an all-encompassing ‘photonic’ or ‘charge-without-charge’ unified theory. Again, I remain skeptical. 🙂

The Breit-Wheeler process: can matter be created out of light?

Post- or pre-scriptum (added on 22 October 2023): I did what I promised to do below, and that is to analyze SLAC’s E144 experiment in detail. We do so in a recently added new chapter in this series of Lectures: Lecture XI – Can Matter Be Made Out of Light? We warmly recommend reading the paper, because it is extremely relevant when it comes to understanding the basic hypotheses of modern quantum physics. 🙂

I am rather surprised – and not, at the same time – that my paper on matter-antimatter pair production is getting a fair number of downloads (about 4500 downloads now) – despite my rather free-wheeling (scathing?) language. It basically argues the experiments ‘proving’ the 1934 Breit-Wheeler hypothesis, do not prove much at all! Worse, I actually claim they are not proving anything at all, and that the charge that comes out of these experiments can be explained by looking at the reactions as a nuclear process (there is always a nucleus nearby, with neutrons that can provide the charged particle pairs that come out of the reaction).

I disengaged from further research because of a lack of time, but it is probably the one and only aspect of the new physics that I want to examine further. Why? Because it will either prove or disprove my rather classical interpretation of quantum physics. Indeed, with all due respect to Gregory Breit and John Archibald Wheeler – neither of which got a Nobel Prize in Physics – I think the Breit-Wheeler hypothesis (matter formation – pair production – can be formed out of interacting light particles) remains unproven. In my not-so-humble view, it is based on an erroneous interpretation of Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation. Mass is energy, of course, but this equivalence must be rooted in an interpretation of mass as charge in motion, and dig back into de Broglie’s original hypothesis:

“We may, thus, conceive that, because of some grand law of Nature, a periodic phenomenon of frequency ν0 would be associated with each energy packet with rest mass m0, such that hν0 = m0c2. The frequency ν0 is, of course, to be measured, in the rest frame of the energy packet. This hypothesis is the basis of our theory: it is, just like all hypotheses, worth only as much as the consequences that can be deduced from it.”[1]

As we explain in our most downloaded paper, the de Broglie frequency is the orbital frequency of the positive or negative charge inside a proton or an electron, respectively (or, in the neutron, the neutral combination of both):

  • Photons are photons: traveling fields (think of them as a force without a charge to act upon).
  • Matter-particles are matter-particles: charge in motion. Fields do not convert into charge, or vice versa: the charge must already be there.

We will do our best to rewrite this paper in a more academic version by studying the E-144 articles and papers when we have time. We could not access them because they are – mostly – in a PS format. This may sound like a poor excuse.[2] It is. However, we also noted this:

  1. Wikipedia authors cornering interesting topics (including the Zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum mechanics) are usually biased towards presenting hypotheses as facts. On the Breit-Wheeler process, the article is remarkably nuanced. It dryly quotes from a 2016 article in Physics Review E [3] that, although “direct production of electron–positron pairs in two-photon collisions, the Breit–Wheeler process, is one of the basic processes in the universe” – we very much doubt this, as should be clear from this paper – “it has never been directly observed in the laboratory.”
  2. While the referenced Physics Review E article says this is “because of the absence of intense enough γ-ray sources”, we stick to our intuition and think there is more at play: we effectively concur with the more skeptical voices in this more recent (2021) ScienceNews appraisal[4]: as long as this experiment cannot be performed with “indisputably real photons”, we think of matter-light conversions not only as not being real, but as being logically (or, should we say, ontologically?) impossible.

The fact that the Particle Data Group has close to zero information on Breit-Wheeler processes confirms all of the above – in our not-so-humble view again, at least. We believe in Wheeler’s mass-without-mass vision, but not in his mass-without-charge (or charge-without-charge) ideas!

[1] Translated from the de Broglie’s Recherches sur la Théorie des Quanta (Ann. de Phys., 10e série, t. III (Janvier-Février 1925: « On peut donc concevoir que par suite d’une grande loi de la Nature, à chaque morceau d’énergie de masse propre m0, soit lié un phénomène périodique de fréquence ν0 telle que l’on ait : hν0 = m0c2, ν0 étant mesurée, bien entendu, dans le système lié au morceau d’énergie. Cette hypothèse est la base de notre système : elle vaut, comme toutes les hypothèses, ce que valent les conséquences qu’on en peut déduire. »

[2] A professional Adobe Acrobat subscription – which I do not have right now – should make them readable, right? However, we note the site has not been updated since 1998, so this does not inspire much confidence: have there been no replications of these experiments since then? Apparently not. :-/

[3] Admittedly, Physics Review E is, apparently, not a prime journal in particle physics. The Wikipedia entry on it notes that its focus is on many-body phenomena, although its “broad scope” also includes “quantum chaos, soft matter physics, classical chaos, biological physics and granular materials.”

[4] The overview is – admittedly – ‘journalistic’ only (that is the nature of ScienceReview), but we think it offers a more objective assessment of the current state of play in regard to this line of research.

The Uncertainty Principle, statistical determinism, and free will

I just came back from a consultancy (an IT assessment – it is nice to be fully focused again on work rather than obscure quantum-mechanical models) and, while flying back, I wrote a small paper on the implications of what I have tried to do (showing that, ultimately, we can understand Nature as being ‘statistically deterministic’, just like what A. Einstein and H.A. Lorentz always said) on epistemology, or the inquiry that philosophers refer to as ‘metaphysics’ (interpreted as thoughts on the ‘essence’ of Nature).

I also detail why and how it does not do away with what is probably the single most important foundation of our society (laws, business, etcetera): the idea of free will. Here is the link to the paper, and below I copy the key conclusions:

What I write above [see the paper] and its explanations of the principle of uncertainty as used in modern physics should not make you think that I do not believe in a religious mindset: conscious thoughts, or some sense or feeling of wonder that we would refer to as religious or – a better word, perhaps – mystical. On the contrary, in my journey to understanding, I have often been amazed that our mind is able to understand all of this. Here again, I appreciate my courses of philosophy – especially Hegel’s idea on the concept of our human mind encompassing and understanding more and more as mankind continues its rather lonely journey on a very small planet in a Universe whose borders we cannot imagine.

Such feeling of wonder – an old teacher of mine said the Greeks referred to this as tauma, and that it fuels our desire for knowledge, but I have not been able to find any bibliographic reference to this idea – is, exactly, what has been driving my own personal journey in search of truth. Whether you call that religious or not, is not of much interest to me: I have no need to describe that experience in old or new words.

Likewise, statistically determinism does not do away with the concept of free will: of course, we are the product of a rather amazing evolution, which I think of as rather random – but I do not attach negative connotation to this randomness. On the contrary, while our human mind was originally concerned with making sense of life or death situations, it is now free to think about other things: one’s own personal condition, or the human condition at large. Such thinking may lead to us taking rational decisions that actually change the path that we are following: we stop drinking or smoking for health reasons, perhaps, or we engage in a non-profit project aimed at improving our neighborhood or society at large. And we all realize we should change our behavior in order to ensure the next generation lives in an even better world than we do.

All of this is evidence of a true free will. It is based on our mental ability to rationally analyze in what situation we happen to find ourselves, so as to then try to do what we think we should be doing.

Capra, Zukov, Gribbin are all over 80+ years old now…

Gary Zukov was in his late thirties when he wrote his Dancing Wu Li Masters. It further built on Fritjov Capra’s Tao of Physics. Both Zukov and Capra are still alive: 80+ years now. Both books still sell well, just like John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s cat. I quote from Amazon’s sales headline for the latter:

“Quantum theory is so shocking that Einstein could not bring himself to accept it. It is so important that it provides the fundamental underpinning of all modern sciences. Without it, we’d have no nuclear power or nuclear weapons, no TV, no computers, no science of molecular biology, no understanding of DNA, no genetic engineering.”

Einstein could not bring himself to accept it, right? And TV or nuclear power or molecular biology would never have seen the light without Bohr and Heisenberg taking over from Einstein, Lorentz, or de Broglie, right? […] Plain nonsense. Einstein’s revolution is over. It is about time the likes of Zukov, Capra, Gribbin and their contemporaries – Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, Sean Carroll, etcetera – accept it: Einstein was right along, and accusing Einstein of not having an open mind – he pioneered the true bedrock of physics: relativity theory, didn’t he? – sounds nuts to me.[1]

I am wondering if a book like the one I am thinking of – some kind of exchange between the wisdom that generations hand over – would ever make for a bestseller. Probably not. In any case, I want to write the first pages of such a book here.

Fields, charge, and energy concepts

Papa, I understand your particle theory now. It explains the diffraction pattern on the detector plate when you send electrons through a slit. I can also see why this two-slit interference pattern is just a superposition of two one-slit diffraction patterns. No mystery. Agreed. But photons?

What do you mean?

Your explanation of electron interference does away with interference. It explains this arriving of one electron – arriving as the lump it always one – when going through a slit or past the edge of a far more massive and complicated structure or system of charged oscillations. But in the one-photon Mach-Zehnder experiment – or when measuring radio signal strengths at a distance – we have photons – or half-photons (the linear components of circularly polarized photons – I am just quoting your own theory here) – coming together and vanishing (destructive interference) or – quite the opposite – combining into some new photon with twice the energy of the incoming full- or half-photons?

You are now fully grown up – a promising young adolescent with an MD degree – and so you should think for yourself now. The dominating Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us that Nature is just some kind of black box, and the best we can do is to think of some input-output relations to describe what goes in and what comes out. I have been fighting on many fronts, and I first wanted to get my matter-particle model right. I should now go back to these experiments demonstrating how light interference might or might not work. They all involve an apparatus which is referred to as an interferometer. There are various types around, but the Michelson-Morley interferometer still describes the basic components. We have a light source, some mirrors and one or more beam splitters – which are, basically, still simple half-silvered mirrors. The beam splitter splits the beam, and the mirrors are then adjusted so as to produce constructive or destructive interference.

The classical explanation is easy enough: the two beams arrive in phase or, alternatively, out of phase and we, therefore, have constructive or destructive interference when recombining them. However, when we want to analyze this in terms of one single photon, this classical picture becomes quite complicated. Physicists will tell you the photon cannot actually split itself, and they will start talking about amplitudes – based on which they will calculate probabilities of this or that happening – but they will never explain what is actually happening.

I always told you it should be possible to develop a classical picture of all of this, and that classical picture of what is happening in terms of photons would be pretty much like what is shown below. Photons arrive in lumps too, but a circularly polarized photon can be split into two linearly polarized half-photons – just like an electromagnetic wave that is circularly polarized. There is no mystery: the wave components – linear or circularly polarized photons – have the same properties as the wave. 😊

Papa, I do not get the recombination stuff when we are talking photons. Where is the energy going? These idealized experiments show that we always get a recombined beam with the same frequency – or one that vanishes – but, according to classical theory, we must have in-between realities. When the phase difference between the two incoming beams is small, its amplitude is going to be much larger. To be precise, it is going to be twice the amplitude of the incoming beams for Δ = 0. In contrast, if the two beams are out of phase, the amplitude is going to be much smaller, and it is going to be zero if the two waves are 180 degrees out of phase (Δ = π), as shown below. That does not make sense because twice the amplitude means four times the energy, and zero amplitude means zero energy. The energy conservation law is being violated: photons are being multiplied or, conversely, are being destroyed.

Darling, you must remember light-particles are fundamentally different from matter-particles. There is no kinetic energy: no physical charge in a weird dance. Field energy is like the field itself: we are talking a force without a charge to act upon. The superposition principle in physics applies to fields in a very different way than it applies to charged particles. Bose-Einstein versus Fermi-Dirac statistics. Photons – light-particles in general – ‘occupy’ space very differently than matter-particles: they can literally be on top of each other if they are all in phase or – conversely – out of phase. In the first case, they combine to produce twice the energy. Because photon frequencies and amplitudes do not change, it looks like the number of photons must double. Conversely, field energies combine to make photons with opposite phase vanish into nothing. It is a weird thing, perhaps – but it makes sense to me. All that I know is that we should not substitute this coherent world view for the guru-like models that have been perpetuated by Heisenberg and Bohr. [I explicitly exclude Born, because I think his interpretation of the wavefunction as a hardcore probability distribution function based on energy densities made sense.]

You should read Lamb’s Anti-Photon article once more. It has (almost) all of the answers. Fields exchange energy with matter-particles in quantized units only. It is all very marvelous but not mysterious.[2]

Are fields potential energy?

Not quite. The physical dimension of an electric or magnetic field, a potential, energy itself (kinetic or potential energy), are all different, and you need to keep track of those dimensions when analyzing interference or how the superposition principle comes into play. But I would be rewriting a lot of what I wrote already to convey the deeper understanding you need.

Fritjov Capra started off the right footing when he wrote out his motivation: “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.” That is about all we have in common. Too bad he didn’t do more with it. But modern-day physicists do not do much more, either.

What do you mean?

Einstein never got a Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. This Stockholm Royal Academy of Sciences makes weird decisions. Just last year, they gave a Nobel Prize to a climate change denier. There is something rotten in academia, but it will take a while before academia (or the Stockholm Royal Academy of Sciences) recognizes that. In the meanwhile, Alfred Nobel must be turning around in his grave. I cannot imagine Einstein would worry about it. 😊  

Brussels, 12 September 2023

[1] I warmly recommend reading Einstein’s articles directly. His 1905 article on special relativity theory toys and plays with ideas (such as the idea of an electron having some lateral mass in its motion – which I subscribe to: too bad Einstein did not explore Schrödinger’s Zitterbewegung hypothesis) like no one else can. Accusing Einstein of a lack of imagination – which is what is implied here – is utterly nonsensical.

[2] Pages 148-153 of my manuscript have the basic explanation of one-photon Mach-Zehnder interference. Go have a look. I should write it all out, but I was born lazy. 😊

Another tainted Nobel Prize…

Last year’s (2022) Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

I did not think much of that award last year. Proving that Bell’s No-Go Theorem cannot be right? Great. Finally! I think many scientists – including Bell himself – already knew this theorem was a typical GIGO argument: garbage in, garbage out. As the young Louis de Broglie famously wrote in the introduction of his thesis: hypotheses are worth only as much as the consequences that can be deduced from it, and the consequences of Bell’s Theorem did not make much sense. As I wrote in my post on it, Bell himself did not think much of his own theorem until, of course, he got nominated for a Nobel Prize: it is a bit hard to say you got nominated for a Nobel Prize for a theory you do not believe in yourself, isn’t it? In any case, Bell’s Theorem has now been experimentally disproved. That is – without any doubt – a rather good thing. 🙂 To save the face of the Nobel committee here (why award something that disproves something else that you would have given an award a few decades ago?): Bell would have gotten a Nobel Prize, but he died from brain hemorrhage before, and Nobel Prizes reward the living only.

As for entanglement, I repeat what I wrote many times already: the concept of entanglement – for which these scientists got a Nobel Prize last year – is just a fancy word for the simultaneous conservation of energy, linear and angular momentum (and – if we are talking matter-particles – charge). There is ‘no spooky action at a distance’, as Einstein would derogatorily describe it when the idea was first mentioned to him. So, I do not see why a Nobel Prize should be awarded for rephrasing a rather logical outcome of photon experiments in metamathematical terms.

Finally, the Nobel Prize committee writes that this has made a significant contribution to quantum information science. I wrote a paper on the quantum computing hype, in which I basically ask this question: qubits may or may not be better devices than MOSFETs to store data – they are not, and they will probably never be – but that is not the point. How does quantum information change the two-, three- or n-valued or other rule-based logic that is inherent to the processing of information? I wish the Nobel Prize committee could be somewhat more explicit on that because, when everything is said and done, one of the objectives of the Prize is to educate the general public about the advances of science, isn’t it? :-/

However, all this ranting of mine is, of course, unimportant. We know that it took the distinguished Royal Swedish Science Academy more than 15 years to even recognize the genius of an Einstein, so it was already clear then that their selection criteria were not necessarily rational. [Einstein finally got a well-deserved Nobel Prize, not for relativity theory (strangely enough: if there is one thing on which all physicist are agreed, it is that relativity theory is the bedrock of all of physics, isn’t it?), but for a much less-noted paper on the photoelectric effect – in 1922: 17 years after his annus mirabilis papers had made a killing not only in academic circles but in the headlines of major newspapers as well, and 10 years after a lot of fellow scientists had nominated him for it (1910).]

Again, Mahatma Gandhi never got a Nobel Price for Peace (so Einstein should consider himself lucky to get some Nobel Prize, right?), while Ursula von der Leyen might be getting one for supporting the war with Russia, so I must remind myself of the fact that we do live in a funny world and, perhaps, we should not be trying to make sense of these rather weird historical things. 🙂

Let me turn to the main reason why I am writing this indignant post. It is this: I am utterly shocked by what Dr. John Clauser has done with his newly gained scientific prestige: he joined the CO2 coalition! For those who have never heard of it, it is a coalition of climate change deniers. A bunch of people who:

(1) vehemently deny the one and only consensus amongst all climate scientists, and that is the average temperature on Earth has risen with about two degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and

(2) say that, if climate change would be real (God forbid!), then we can reverse the trend by easy geo-engineering. We just need to use directed energy or whatever to create more white clouds. If that doesn’t work, then… Well… CO2 makes trees and plants grow, so it will all sort itself out by itself.

[…]

Yes. That is, basically, what Dr. Clauser and all the other scientific advisors of this lobby group – none of which have any credentials in the field they are criticizing (climate science) – are saying, and they say it loud and clearly. That is weird enough, already. What is even weirder, is that – to my surprise – a lot of people are actually buying such nonsense.

Frankly, I have not felt angry for a while, but this thing triggered an outburst of mine on YouTube, in which I state clearly what I think of Dr. Clauser and other eminent scientists who abuse their saint-like Nobel Prize status in society to deceive the general public. Watch my video rant, and think about it for yourself. Now, I am not interested in heated discussions on it: I know the basic facts. If you don’t, I listed them here. Look at the basic graphs and measurements before you would want to argue with me on this, please! To be clear on this: I will not entertain violent or emotional reactions to this post or my video. Moreover, I will delete them here on WordPress and also on my YouTube channel. Yes. For the first time in 10 years or so, I will exercise my right as a moderator of my channels, which is something I have never done before. 🙂

[…]

I will now calm down and write something about the mainstream interpretation of quantum physics again. 🙂 In fact, this morning I woke up with a joke in my head. You will probably think the joke is not very good, but then I am not a comedian and so it is what it is and you can judge for yourself. The idea is that you’d learn something from it. Perhaps. 🙂 So, here we go.

Imagine shooting practice somewhere. A soldier fires at some target with a fine gun, and then everyone looks at the spread of the hits around the bullseye. The quantum physicist says: “See: this is the Uncertainty Principle at work! What is the linear momentum of these bullets, and what is the distance to the target? Let us calculate the standard error.” The soldier looks astonished and says: “No. This gun is no good. One of the engineers should check it.” Then the drill sergeant says this: “The gun is fine. From this distance, all bullets should have hit the bullseye. You are a miserable shooter and you should really practice a lot more.” He then turns to the academic and says: “How did you get in here? I do not understand a word of what you just said and, if I do, it is of no use whatsoever. Please bugger off asap!”

This is a stupid joke, perhaps, but there is a fine philosophical point to it: uncertainty is not inherent to Nature, and it also serves no purpose whatsoever in the science of engineering or in science in general. All in Nature is deterministic. Statistically deterministic, but deterministic nevertheless. We do not know the initial conditions of the system, perhaps, and that translates into seemingly random behavior, but if there is a pattern in that behavior (a diffraction pattern, in the case of electron or photon diffraction), then the conclusion should be that there is no such thing as metaphysical ‘uncertainty’. In fact, if you abandon that principle, then there is no point in trying to discover the laws of the Universe, is there? Because if Nature is uncertain, then there are no laws, right? 🙂

To underscore this point, I will, once again, remind you of what Heisenberg originally wrote about uncertainty. He wrote in German and distinguished three very different ideas of uncertainty:

(1) The precision of our measurements may be limited: Heisenberg originally referred to this as an Ungenauigkeit.

(2) Our measurement might disturb the position and, as such, cause the information to get lost and, as a result, introduce an uncertainty in our knowledge, but not in reality. Heisenberg originally referred to such uncertainty as an Unbestimmtheit.

(3) One may also think the uncertainty is inherent to Nature: that is what Heisenberg referred to as Ungewissheit. There is nothing in Nature – and also nothing in Heisenberg’s writings, really – that warrants the elevation of this Ungewissheit to a dogma in modern physics. Why? Because it is the equivalent of a religious conviction, like God exists or He doesn’t (both are theses we cannot prove: Ryle labeled such hypotheses as ‘category mistakes’).

Indeed, when one reads the proceedings of the Solvay Conferences of the late 1920s, 1930s and immediately after WW II (see my summary of it in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341177799_A_brief_history_of_quantum-mechanical_ideas), then it is pretty clear that none of the first-generation quantum physicists believed in such dogma and – if they did – that they also thought what I am writing here: that it should not be part of science but part of one’s personal religious beliefs.

So, once again, I repeat that this concept of entanglement – for which John Clauser got a Nobel Prize last year – is in the same category: it is just a fancy word for the simultaneous conservation of energy, linear and angular momentum, and charge. There is ‘no spooky action at a distance’, as Einstein would derogatorily describe it when the idea was first mentioned to him.

Let me end by noting the dishonor of Nobel Prize winner John Clauser once again. Climate change is real: we are right in the middle of it, and it is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better – if it is ever going to get better (which, in my opinion, is a rather big ‘if‘…). So, no matter how many Nobel Prize winners deny it, they cannot change the fact that average temperature on Earth has risen by about 2 degrees Celsius since 1850 already. The question is not: is climate change happening? No. The question now is: how do we adapt to it – and that is an urgent question – and, then, the question is: can we, perhaps, slow down the trend, and how? In short, if these scientists from physics or the medical field or whatever other field they excel in are true and honest scientists, then they would do a great favor to mankind not by advocating geo-engineering schemes to reverse a trend they actually deny is there, but by helping to devise and promote practical measures to allow communities that are affected by natural disaster to better recover from them.

So, I’ll conclude this rant by repeating what I think of all of this. Loud and clear: John Clauser and the other scientific advisors of the CO2 coalition are a disgrace to what goes under the name of ‘science’, and this umpteenth ‘incident’ in the history of science or logical thinking makes me think that it is about time that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences does some serious soul-searching when, amongst the many nominations, it selects its candidates for a prestigious award like this. Alfred Nobel – one of those geniuses who regretted his great contribution to science and technology was (also) (ab)used to increase the horrors of war – must have turned too many times in his grave now… :-/

Cold fusion (LENR) revisited…

One of the nice things that happened to me on this rather weird exploration of the world of quantum physics – a journey which I now want to leave behind, because I found what I wanted to find: a common-sense interpretation of it all, and a concise model of elementary particles – was that, back in 2020, I was invited to join a low-key symposium on cold fusion (or ‘low energy nuclear reactions’, as the field is now referred to): RNBE-2020. That was followed by rather intense exchanges with a few scientists who work or worked on a theory centered around the concept of deep nuclear electron orbitals. All very interesting, because it confirmed what I think is the case in this field: there are some crooks around, but most research is done by very honest and integer scientists, albeit – admittedly – it’s all a bit on the fringes of mainstream theory.

I summed up my rather skeptical conclusions on these conversations in a 2021 blog post here: cold and hot fusion – just hot air? The ‘hot’ in the title of that post does not refer to real hot nuclear fusion (because that is not just ‘hot’ but extremely hot: we are not talking thousands but millions degrees Celsius here). No, we refer to the rather high temperatures of things like the hydrino scheme which – in my not-so-humble view – has seriously damaged the credibility of the field: these high temperatures are still – visibly – in the thermal range. Indeed, I looked at the videos, and I just see some kind of small copper alloy furnaces melting away. Now, copper alloys melt around 1000° C, and burning hydrogen yields temperatures around 2000° C. Hence, in the absence of any other evidence (such as spectroscopic measurements), I conclude these BLP experiments are just burning ordinary hydrogen. That is sad, because cold fusion and LENR already suffered from poor reputation.

But so I had long email exchanges on more interesting things, and that was nice. Going back to the possibility of deep electron orbitals being real, somehow, I initially entertained the rather vague idea that – who knows, right? – the mix of Zitterbewegung charges (positive and negative) – which, in my ‘mass-without-mass’ model of elementary particles, have zero rest mass – might, perhaps, combine in nuclear oscillations that have not been modeled so far. Indeed, when everything is said and done, I myself broke my teeth – so to speak – on trying to model the neutron itself – stable only inside of a nucleus – as a neutral ring current or nuclear ‘glue’ between protons. I did not succeed, but I still believe it should be possible. And if an analytical model could be found to model the motion of multiple pointlike zbw charges as a stable equilibrium that – as a whole – respects the Planck-Einstein relation, then we might, perhaps, also discover novel ways to unleash the binding energy between them, right?

So, these are some of the good things I want to – carefully and prudently – state about the field. I must now say why I am and remain skeptical. It is fair to say that everyone can easily see and verify how the energy of say, a photon in a laser beam, can dissipate away and, in the process, trigger very different reactions. Reactions that one would not associate with the energies of the incoming photons: all these reactions would qualify as some kind of anomalous heat, I would think. Think, for example, of using a high-powered laser to cut small tree branches, which is possible now. I have not studied the mechanics of this (too bad because I’ve been wanting to study the mechanics of lasers for many years now, but I never found the time to dig into Einstein’s or other theories on how it works – not approximately, but exactly), but I can easily see how the process of Compton scattering would explain why a substantial part of the energy of the photons would be absorbed by (1) outgoing photons with lower energy and (2) electrons with substantially higher kinetic energies. This kinetic energy would then redistribute all over the system (not only other electrons but even the massive nuclei at the center of each atomic and molecular system inside of these easy-to-burn materials, be they paper, carton, or wood). In short, we get heat: thermal energy. And quite a lot of it.

However, this process involves triggering lower-energy reactions: thermal or chemical reactions (fire actually is chemistry). [Also, you can easily see a lot of energy gets lost: using a 2000 W laser to cut branches that are only a few cm in diameter is not very energy-efficient, right? This is a point which I also talk about in my previous post on LENR: what is the energy balance? What is the total input energy and what is the nuclear fuel, respectively, and how do these two elements combine to make you think you’d get net energy out of the whole process?]

Regardless of the total energy equation (input – output), the first question is the more relevant one, because it goes to the core of the what and how of LENR. My blunt appraisal here is that of other skeptics: I cannot imagine how the energy in laser photons could – somehow – build up a sufficient reservoir of energy, to then reach a threshold and trigger an outright and proper nuclear or high-energy reaction.

If it is possible at all, it would have to be some kind of resonance process: a lower frequency feeding into a much higher-frequency phenomenon and gradually increasing its amplitude. How would it do that? That is simple. Harmonic oscillations have several natural frequencies, and the lower-energy oscillation can feed into one or more of these. See my post on music and math for an analytical explanation or – if you want something simpler – just think of a child on a swing, which – once in a while – you give an extra push in the back. You do not necessarily have to do that each and every time the swing comes back. No: you don’t need to push each and every time but, if you do push, you have to do at the right time. 🙂

Going back to LENR, we may think the frequency of a laser may feed into a nuclear oscillation, gradually increasing its amplitude, until the accumulated energy is sufficiently high and reaches some threshold triggering a proper nuclear or high-energy reaction. Frankly, I think this possibly could explain low-energy nuclear reactions. So, yes, it might be possible.

At the same time, I think it is rather unlikely. Why? At the smallest of scales, the Planck-Einstein relation holds, and so we have discrete energy states. These discrete energy states of protons, electrons, nuclei, atoms or molecules as a whole do not have any in-between states in which you can dump excess or surplus energy from somewhere outside. A photon-electron interaction triggers a reaction, and that’s not gradually but (almost) instantly. So, energy is being emitted as soon as it absorbed. Disequilibrium states do not last very long: atomic systems go back to equilibrium very quickly, and any excess energy is quickly emitted by photons or absorbed as internal heat, which is a (very) low-energy oscillation of the massive bits in whatever material you are using in these experiments (most experiments are on palladium, and the discussions on the effects impurities might have in the experiments are – frankly – a bit worrying). In any case, the point is that these disequilibrium states do surely not last long enough to entertain the kind of resonance processes that, say, made the Tacoma Bridge collapse. :-/ To make a long story short, I am and remain skeptical.

However, to my surprise, I was invited to join in a Zoom e-call, and listen to the rather interesting discussion on the future of both the French and International Society for Condensed Nuclear Matter (SFCMNS and ISCMNS, respectively – I will not put the links because they are both revamping their website now) after they had wrapped up their 25th International Conference.

What I saw and heard, made me quite happy: these were all honest and critical scientists looking at real-life experiments that do yield surprising results. Result that contradict my rather skeptical theoretical arguments (above) against LENR being possible. I also noted the Anthropocène Institute invests in them. I also note Nobuo Tanaka, former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (not to be confused with the International Atomic Energy Agency!), spoke at ICCF-24, plus a lot of other very serious people. Also, it is quite obvious that nuclear energy is no longer out. On the contrary, it is in again and – as part of new investments in nuclear research – I think the LENR field should also be reconsidered, despite its chequered past. I also note LENR research in Japan is getting a lot more funding than research in the EU or the US, so perhaps they are seeing something that we do not see (it would be interesting to check what happens in the patents or IPR area on this). 🙂

So, all these considerations add up to more than enough – to me, at least – to continue giving these researchers the benefit of the doubt. We live in a fascinating world and, as the Wikipedia article on cold fusion notes, the discovery of the Mössbauer and other strange nuclear effects was also rather unexpected – in the sense that it had not been foreseen or predicted by some theorist. I do, therefore, not agree with the same Wikipedia article dismissing LENR as ‘pathological‘ or ‘cargo cult‘ science.

If anything, I think mainstream research sometimes also suffers from what critics say of the LENR field: “people are tricked into false results … by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.” But that is only a personal and non-relevant remark, as I am quitting my hobbyist study of physics now. It has lasted long enough (over a decade, really) and – as mentioned a few times already – I think I sort of get it now. As Feynman famously said in the Epilogue to his Lectures: “After all, it isn’t as horrible as it looks.”

I might add: I think the end of physics is near. All that’s left, is engineering. And quite a lot of it. 🙂

The shortest introduction to physics – ever !

My ‘last’ post talks about the end of physics as a science: nothing or nothing much is left to explain but – of course – a lot of engineering is left to be done! 😉

I thought it would really be my last post, but then I thought I’d also do a short video on my YouTube channel, and so I did that. This is the link to what I titled: “The shortest introduction to quantum physics – ever!”

Have a look and see if you like it ! If you do it, do leave a comment ! 🙂

The End of Physics

I wrote a post with this title already, but this time I mean it in a rather personal way: my last paper – with the same title – on ResearchGate sums up rather well whatever I achieved, and also whatever I did not explore any further because time and energy are lacking: I must pay more attention to my day job nowadays. 🙂

I am happy with the RG score all of my writing generated, the rare but heartfelt compliments I got from researchers with far more credentials than myself (such as, for example, Dr. Emmanouil Markoulakis of Nikolaos, which led me to put a paper on RG with a classical explanation of the Lamb shift), various friendly but not necessarily always agreeing commentators (one of them commenting here on this post: a good man!), and, yes, the interaction on my YouTube channel. But so… Well… That is it, then! 🙂

As a farewell, I will just quote from the mentioned paper – The End of Physics (only as a science, of course) – hereunder, and I hope that will help you to do what all great scientists would want you to do, and that is to think things through for yourself. 🙂

Brussels, 22 July 2023

Bohr, Heisenberg, and other famous quantum physicists – think of Richard Feynman, John Stewart Bell, Murray Gell-Mann, and quite a few other Nobel Prize winning theorists[1] – have led us astray. They swapped a rational world view – based on classical electromagnetic theory and statistical determinism – for a mystery world in which anything is possible, but nothing is real.

They invented ‘spooky action at a distance’ (as Einstein derogatorily referred to it), for example. So, what actually explains that long-distance interaction, then? It is quite simple. There is no interaction, and so there is nothing spooky or imaginary or unreal about it: if by measuring the spin state of one photon, we also know the spin state of its twin far away, then it is – quite simply – because physical quantities such as energy and momentum (linear or angular) will be conserved if no other interference is there after the two matter- or light-particles were separated.

Plain conservation laws explain many other things that are being described as ‘plain mysteries’ in quantum physics. The truth is this: there are no miracles or mysteries: everything has a physical cause and can be explained.[2] For example, there is also nothing mysterious about the interference pattern and the trajectory of an electron going through a slit, or one of two nearby slits. An electron is pointlike, but it is not infinitesimally small: it has an internal structure which explains its wave-like properties. Likewise, Mach-Zehnder one-photon interference can easily be explained when thinking of its polarization structure: a circularly polarized photon can be split in two linearly polarized electromagnetic waves, which are photons in their own right. Everything that you have been reading about mainstream quantum physics is, perhaps, not wrong, but it is highly misleading because it is all couched in guru language and mathematical gibberish.

Why is that mainstream physicists keep covering up? I am not sure: it is a strange mix of historical accident and, most probably, the human desire to be original or special, or the need to mobilize money for so-called fundamental research. I also suspect there is a rather deceitful intention to hide truths about what nuclear science should be all about, and that is to understand the enormous energies packed into elementary particles.[3]

The worst of all is that none of the explanations in mainstream quantum physics actually works: mainstream theory does not have a sound theory of signal propagation, for example (click the link to my paper on that or – better, perhaps – this link to our paper on signal propagation), and Schrödinger’s hydrogen model is a model of a hypothetical atom modelling orbitals of equally hypothetical zero-spin electron pairs. Zero-spin electrons do not exist, and real-life hydrogen only has one proton at its center, and one electron orbiting around it. Schrödinger’s equation is relativistically correct – even if all mainstream physicists think it is not – but the equation includes two mistakes that cancel each other out: it confuses the effective mass of an electron in motion with its total mass[4], and the 1/2 factor which is introduced by the m = 2meff substitution also takes care of the doubling of the potential that is needed to make the electron orbitals come out alright.

The worst thing of all is that mainstream quantum physicists never accurately modeled what they should have modeled: the hydrogen atom as a system of a real proton and a real electron (no hypothetical infinitesimally and structureless spin-zero particles). If they had done that, they would also be able to explain why hydrogen atoms come in molecular H2 pairs, and they would have a better theory of why two protons need a neutron to hold together in a helium nucleus. Moreover, they would have been able to explain what a neutron actually is.[5]

[1] James Stewart Bell was nominated for a Nobel Prize, but died from a brain hemorrhage before he could accept the prize for his theorem.

[2] The world of physics – at the micro-scale – is already fascinating enough: why should we invent mysteries?

[3] We do not think these energies can be exploited any time soon. Even nuclear energy is just binding energy between protons and neutrons: a nuclear bomb does not release the energy that is packed into protons. These elementary particles survive the blast: they are the true ‘atoms’ of this world (in the Greek sense of ‘a-tom’, which means indivisible).

[4] Mass is a measure of the inertia to a change in the state of motion of an oscillating charge. We showed how this works by explaining Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation and clearly distinguishing the kinetic and potential energy of an electron. Feynman first models an electron in motion correctly, with an equally correct interpretation of the effective mass of an electron in motion, but then substitutes this effective mass by half the electron mass (meff = m/2) in an erroneous reasoning process based on the non-relativistic kinetic energy concept. The latter reasoning also leads to the widespread misconception that Schrödinger’s equation would not be relativistically correct (see the Annexes to my paper on the matter-wave). For the trick it has to do, Schrödinger’s wave equation is correct – and then I mean also relativistically correct. 🙂

[5] A neutron is unstable outside of its nucleus. We, therefore, think it acts as the glue between protons, and it must be a composite particle.

On the quantum computing hype

1. The Wikipedia article on quantum computing describes a quantum computer as “a computer that exploits quantum -mechanical phenomena.” The rest of the article then tries to explain what these quantum-mechanical phenomena actually are.

Unfortunately, the article limits itself to the mainstream interpretation of these and, therefore, suffers from what I perceive to be logical and philosophical errors. Indeed, in the realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics that I have been developing, system wavefunctions are only useful to model our own uncertainty about the system. I subscribe to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz’s judgment at the last Solvay Conference under his leadership: there is no need whatsoever to elevate indeterminism to a philosophical principle. Not in science in general, and not in quantum mechanics in particular. I, therefore, think quantum mechanics cannot offer a substantially new computing paradigm.

Of course, one may argue that, for specific problems, some kind of three- or more-valued logic – rather than the binary or Boolean true/false dichotomy on which most logic circuits are based – may come in handy. However, such logic has already been worked out, and can be accessed using appropriate programming languages. Python and the powerful mathematical tools that come with it (Pandas, NumPy and SciPy) work great with ternary logic using a {true, false, unknown} or a {-1, 0, +1} set of logical values rather than the standard {0, 1} Boolean set. The Wikipedia article on three-valued logic is worth a read and, despite the rather arcane nature of the topic, much better written than the mentioned article: have a look at how operators are used on these three-valued sets in meaningful algebras or logical models, such as that of Kleene, Priest or Lukasiewicz.

2. One may, of course, argue that, even when there is probably no such thing as a new logical quantum computing model or logic, quantum technology may offer distinct advantages when it comes to storage of data about this or that state or, one day, lead to devices with faster clock and/or bus speeds. That appears to be a pipedream too:

  • To keep, say, an electron in this or that spin state, one must create and steady an electromagnetic field – usually one does so in a superconducting environment, which makes actual mechanical devices used for quantum computing (qubits) look like the modern-day equivalent of Babbage’s analytical machine. In my not-so-humble view, such devices will never ever achieve the sheer material performance offered by current nanometer-scale MOSFETs.  

  • As for bus or transmission speeds, quantum theory does not come with a new theory of charge propagation and, most importantly, is fundamentally flawed in its analysis of how signals actually propagate in, say, a lattice structure. I refer to one of my papers here (on electron propagation in a lattice), in which I deconstruct Feynman’s analysis of the concept of the free and effective mass of an electron. Hence, for long-distance transmission of signals, optical fiber cannot be beaten. For short-distance transmission of signals (say, within an electrical circuit, I refer to the above-mentioned nano-technology which continues to revolutionize the chip industry.

Brussels, 4 July 2023

Epilogue: an Easter podcast

I have been thinking on my explanation of dark matter/energy, and I think it is sound. It solves the last asymmetry in my models, and explains all. So, after a hiatus of two years, I bothered to make a podcast on my YouTube channel once again. It talks about everything. Literally everything !

It makes me feel my quest for understanding of matter and energy – in terms of classical concepts and measurements (as depicted below) – has ended. Perhaps I will write more but that would only be to promote the material, which should promote itself if it is any good (which I think it is).

I should, by way of conclusion, say a few final words about Feynman’s 1963 Lectures now. When everything is said and done, it is my reading of them which had triggered this blog about ten years ago. I would now recommend Volume I and II (classical physics and electromagnetic theory) – if only because it gives you all the math you need to understand all of physics – but not Volume III (the lectures on quantum mechanics). They are outdated, and I do find Feynman guilty of promoting rather than explaining the hocus-pocus around all of the so-called mysteries in this special branch of physics.

Quantum mechanics is special, but I do conclude now that it can all be explained in terms of classical concepts and quantities. So, Gell-Mann’s criticism of Richard Feynman is, perhaps, correct: Mr. Feynman did, perhaps, make too many jokes – and it gets annoying because he must have known some of what he suggests does not make sense – even if I would not go as far as Gell-Mann, who says “Feynman was only concerned about himself, his ego, and his own image !” :-/

So, I would recommend my own alternative series of ‘lectures’. Not only are they easier to read, but they also embody a different spirit of writing. Science is not about you, it is about thinking for oneself and deciding on what is truthful and useful, and what is not. So, to conclude, I will end by quoting Ludwig Boltzmann once more:

“Bring forward what is true.

Write it so that it is clear.

Defend it to your last breath.”

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906)

Post scriptum: As for the ‘hocus-pocus’ in Feynman’s Lectures, we should, perhaps, point once again to some of our early papers on the flaws in his arguments. We effectively put our finger on the arbitrary wavefunction convention, or the (false) boson-fermion dichotomy, or the ‘time machine’ argument that is inherent to his explanation of the Hamiltonian, and so on. We published these things on Academia.edu before (also) putting our (later) papers ResearchGate, so please check there for the full series. 🙂

Post scriptum (23 April 2023): Also check out this video, which was triggered by someone who thought my models amount to something like a modern aether theory, which it is definitely not the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X38u2-nXoto. 🙂 I really think it is my last reflection on these topics. I need to focus on my day job, sports, family, etcetera again ! 🙂