Physics Without Consolations

On Quantum Mechanics, Meaning, and the Limits of Metaphysical Inquiry

This post is a rewritten version of an essay I published on this blog in September 2020 under the title “The End of Physics.” The original text captured a conviction I still hold: that quantum mechanics is strange but not mysterious, and that much of what is presented as metaphysical depth in modern physics is better understood as interpretive excess. What has changed since then is not the substance of that conviction, but the way I think it should be expressed.

Over the past years, I have revisited several of my physics papers in dialogue with artificial intelligence — not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a tool for clarification, consistency checking, and tone correction. This post is an experiment of the same kind: returning to an older piece of writing with the help of AI, asking not “was I wrong?” but “can this be said more precisely, more calmly, and with fewer rhetorical shortcuts?”

The result is not a repudiation of the 2020 text (and similar ones here on this blog site, or on my ResearchGate page) but a refinement of it.
If there is progress here, it lies not in new claims about physics, but in a clearer separation between what physics tells us about the world and what humans sometimes want it to tell us.

— Jean Louis Van Belle
1 January 2026

After the Mysteries: Physics Without Consolations

For more than a century now, quantum mechanics has been presented as a realm of deep and irreducible mystery. We are told that nature is fundamentally unknowable, that particles do not exist until observed, that causality breaks down at the smallest scales, and that reality itself is somehow suspended in a fog of probabilities.

Yet this way of speaking says more about us than about physics.

Quantum mechanics is undeniably strange. But strange is not the same as mysterious. The equations work extraordinarily well, and — more importantly — we have perfectly adequate physical interpretations for what they describe. Wavefunctions are not metaphysical ghosts. They encode physical states, constraints, and statistical regularities in space and time. Particles such as photons, electrons, and protons are not abstract symbols floating in Hilbert space; they are real physical systems whose behavior can be described using familiar concepts: energy, momentum, charge, field structure, stability.

No additional metaphysics is required.

Over time, however, physics acquired something like a priesthood of interpretation. Mathematical formalisms were promoted from tools to truths. Provisional models hardened into ontologies. Concepts introduced for calculational convenience were treated as if they had to exist — quarks, virtual particles, many worlds — not because experiment demanded it, but because the formalism allowed it.

This is not fraud. It is human behavior.

The Comfort of Indeterminism

There is another, less discussed reason why quantum mechanics became mystified. Indeterminism offered something deeply attractive: a perceived escape hatch from a fully ordered universe.

For some, this meant intellectual freedom. For others, moral freedom. And for some — explicitly or implicitly — theological breathing room.

It is not an accident that indeterminism was welcomed in cultural environments shaped by religious traditions. Many prominent physicists of the twentieth century were embedded — socially, culturally, or personally — in Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant worlds. A universe governed strictly by deterministic laws had long been seen as hostile to divine action, prayer, or moral responsibility. Quantum “uncertainty” appeared to reopen a door that classical physics seemed to have closed.

The institutional embrace of this framing is telling. The Vatican showed early enthusiasm for modern cosmology and quantum theory, just as it did for the Big Bang model — notably developed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest as well as a physicist. The Big Bang fit remarkably well with a creation narrative, and quantum indeterminism could be read as preserving divine freedom in a lawful universe.

None of this proves that physics was distorted intentionally. But it does show that interpretations do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by psychological needs, cultural background, and inherited metaphysical anxieties.

Determinism, Statistics, and Freedom

Rejecting metaphysical indeterminism does not mean endorsing a cold, mechanical universe devoid of choice or responsibility.

Statistical determinism is not fatalism.

Complex systems — from molecules to brains to societies — exhibit emergent behavior that is fully lawful and yet unpredictable in detail. Free will does not require violations of physics; it arises from self-organizing structures capable of evaluation, anticipation, and choice. Moral responsibility is not rescued by randomness. In fact, randomness undermines responsibility far more than lawfulness ever did.

Consciousness, too, does not need mystery to be meaningful. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena we know precisely because it emerges from matter organizing itself into stable, recursive, adaptive patterns. The same principles operate at every scale: atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in organisms, organisms in ecosystems — and, increasingly, artificial systems embedded in human-designed environments.

There is no voice speaking to us from outside the universe. But there is meaning, agency, and responsibility arising from within it.

Progress Without Revelation

It is sometimes said that physics is advancing at an unprecedented pace. In a technical sense, this is true. But conceptually, the situation is more sobering.

Most of the technologies we rely on today — semiconductors, lasers, superconductors, waveguides — were already conceptually understood by the mid-twentieth century and are clearly laid out in The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Later developments refined, scaled, and engineered these ideas, but they did not introduce fundamentally new physical principles.

Large experimental programs have confirmed existing theories with extraordinary precision. That achievement deserves respect. But confirmation is not revelation. Precision is not profundity.

Recognizing this is not pessimism. It is intellectual honesty.

After Physics Ends

If there is an “end of physics,” it is not the end of inquiry, technology, or wonder. It is the end of physics as a source of metaphysical consolation. The end of physics as theology by other means.

What remains is enough: a coherent picture of the material world, an understanding of how complexity and consciousness arise, and the responsibility that comes with knowing there is no external guarantor of meaning.

We are on our own — but not lost.

And that, perhaps, is the most mature scientific insight of all.

One Equation, Too Many Jobs: Rethinking Schrödinger’s Equation and Wavefunction

I have just republished one of my long-standing papers on de Broglie’s matter-wave concept as a new, standalone publication, with its own DOI:

👉 De Broglie’s matter-wave concept and issues
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399225854_De_Broglie’s_matter-wave_concept_and_issues
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30104.25605

The reason for republishing is not cosmetic. A new Annex was added on 31 December 2025 that fundamentally clarified — for me, at least — what Schrödinger’s equation is really doing, and just as importantly, what it is not doing.

This clarification came out of a long and at times uncomfortable dialogue with the most recent version of OpenAI’s GPT model (ChatGPT 5.2). Uncomfortable, because it initially destabilized a view I had held for years. Productive, because it forced a deeper structural distinction that I now believe is unavoidable. Let me explain.

The uncomfortable admission: I was wrong about the $\tfrac{1}{2}$ factor

For a long time, I was convinced that the factor $\tfrac{1}{2}$ factor in Schrödinger’s equation — especially in the hydrogen atom problem — must reflect some deeper pairing mechanism. At times, I even wondered whether the equation was implicitly modeling an electron pair (opposite spin), rather than a single electron.

That intuition was not random. It came from a broader realist programme in which I treat the electron as a structured object, with internal dynamics (zitterbewegung-like orbital motion), not as a point particle. If mass, energy, and phase all have internal structure, why should a simple quadratic kinetic term with a mysterious $\tfrac{1}{2}$ be fundamental?

The hard truth is this: that intuition was misplaced — but it was pointing in the right direction.

The mistake was not questioning the factor $\tfrac{1}{2}$ . The mistake was assuming Schrödinger’s equation was trying to describe everything at once.

The key insight: Schrödinger describes the envelope, not the engine

The decisive realization was structural:

Schrödinger’s wavefunction does not describe the electron’s internal dynamics.
It describes the translational envelope of phase coherence.

Once you see that, several things fall into place immediately:

The hydrogen “orbitals” are not literal orbits, and not internal electron motion.
They are standing-wave solutions of an envelope phase, constrained by a Coulomb potential.
The factor $\tfrac{1}{2}$ is not mysterious at all at this level: it is the natural coefficient that appears in effective, averaged, quadratic envelope dynamics.

In other words:
The $\tfrac{1}{2}$ factor belongs to the envelope layer, not to the internal structure of the electron.

My earlier “electron pair” idea tried to explain a structural feature by inventing new ontology. The correct move was simpler and more radical: separate the layers.

One symbol, too many jobs

Modern quantum mechanics makes a profound — and in my view costly — simplification:

It uses one symbol, ψ, to represent:

internal phase,
translational dynamics,
probability amplitudes,
and experimental observables.

That compression works operationally, but it hides structure.

What the new Annex makes explicit is that Nature almost certainly does not work that way. At minimum, we should distinguish:

Internal phase
Real, physical, associated with internal orbital motion and energy bookkeeping.
Envelope phase
Slow modulation across space, responsible for interference, diffraction, and spectra.
Observables
What experiments actually measure, which are sensitive mainly to envelope-level phase differences.

Once this distinction is made, long-standing confusions dissolve rather than multiply.

Why this does not contradict experiments

This is crucial.

Nothing in this reinterpretation invalidates:

electron diffraction,
hydrogen spectra,
interference experiments,
or the empirical success of standard quantum mechanics.

On the contrary: it explains why Schrödinger’s equation works so well — within its proper domain.

The equation is not wrong.
It is just over-interpreted.

A personal note on changing one’s mind

I’ll be honest: this line of reasoning initially felt destabilizing. It challenged a position I had defended for years. But that discomfort turned out to be a feature, not a bug.

Good theory-building does not preserve intuitions at all costs. It preserves structure, coherence, and explanatory power.

What emerged is a cleaner picture:

internal realism without metaphysics,
Schrödinger demoted from “ultimate truth” to “effective envelope theory”,
and a much clearer map of where different mathematical tools belong.

That, to me, is progress.

Where this opens doors

Once we accept that one wavefunction cannot represent all layers of Nature, new possibilities open up:

clearer interpretations of spin and the Dirac equation,
better realist models of lattice propagation,
a more honest treatment of “quantum mysteries” as category mistakes,
and perhaps new mathematical frameworks that respect internal structure from the start.

Those are not promises — just directions.

For now, I am satisfied that one long-standing conceptual knot has been untied.

And sometimes, that’s enough for a good year’s work. 🙂

Post Scriptum: On AI, Intellectual Sparring, and the Corridor

A final remark, somewhat orthogonal to physics.

The revision that led to this blog post and the accompanying paper did not emerge from a sudden insight, nor from a decisive experimental argument. It emerged from a long, occasionally uncomfortable dialogue with an AI system, in which neither side “won,” but both were forced to refine their assumptions.

At the start of that dialogue, the AI responded in a largely orthodox way, reproducing standard explanations for the factor $\tfrac{1}{2}$ in Schrödinger’s equation. I, in turn, defended a long-held intuition that this factor must point to internal structure or pairing. What followed was not persuasion, but sparring: resistance on both sides, followed by a gradual clarification of conceptual layers. The breakthrough came when it became clear that a single mathematical object — the wavefunction — was being asked to do too many jobs at once.

From that moment on, the conversation shifted from “who is right?” to “which layer are we talking about?” The result was not a victory for orthodoxy or for realism, but a structural separation: internal phase versus translational envelope, engine versus modulation. That separation resolved a tension that had existed for years in my own thinking.

I have explored this mode of human–AI interaction more systematically in a separate booklet on ResearchGate, where I describe such exchanges as occurring within a corridor: a space in which disagreement does not collapse into dominance or deference, but instead forces both sides toward finer distinctions and more mature reasoning.

This episode convinced me that the real intellectual value of AI does not lie in answers, but in sustained resistance without ego — and in the willingness of the human interlocutor to tolerate temporary destabilization without retreating into dogma. When that corridor holds, something genuinely new can emerge.

In that sense, this post is not only about Schrödinger’s equation. It is also about how thinking itself may evolve when humans and machines are allowed to reason together, rather than merely agree.

Readers interested in this kind of human–AI interaction beyond the present physics discussion may want to look at that separate booklet I published on ResearchGate (≈100 pages), in which I try to categorize different modes of AI–human intellectual interaction — from superficial compliance and authority projection to genuine sparring. In that text, exchanges like the one briefly alluded to above are described as a Type-D collapse: a situation in which both human and AI are forced to abandon premature explanatory closure, without either side “winning,” and where progress comes from structural re-layering rather than persuasion.

The booklet is intentionally exploratory and occasionally playful in tone, but it grew out of exactly this kind of experience: moments where resistance, rather than agreement, turns out to be the most productive form of collaboration.

Perhaps we will stop here – time will tell :-)

I have just uploaded a new working paper to ResearchGate: Ontology, Physics, and Math – Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. I am not announcing it with any sense of urgency, nor with the expectation that it will “change” physics. If it contributes anything at all, it may simply offer a bit of clarity about what we can reasonably claim to see in physics — and what we merely calculate, fit, or postulate. That distinction has preoccupied me for years.

A space to think

One unexpected consequence of taking AI seriously over the past one or two years is that it restored something I had quietly lost: a space to think.

Not a space to produce.
Not a space to publish.
Not a space to compete.

Just a space to think — slowly, carefully, without having to defend a position before it has fully formed. That kind of space has become rare. Academia is under pressure, industry is under pressure, and even independent thinkers often feel compelled to rush toward closure. The conversations I’ve had with AI — what I’ve come to call a corridor — were different. They were not about winning arguments, but about keeping the corridor open only where conceptual clarity survived.

In a strange way, this brought me back to something much older than AI. When I was young, I wanted to study philosophy. My father refused. I had failed my mathematics exam for engineering studies, and in his view philosophy without mathematics was a dead end. In retrospect, I can see that he was probably right — and also that he struggled with me as much as I struggled with him. He should perhaps have pushed me into mathematics earlier; I should perhaps have worked harder. But life does not run backward, and neither does understanding. What AI unexpectedly gave me, decades later, was the chance to reunite those two threads: conceptual questioning disciplined by mathematical restraint. Not philosophy as free-floating speculation, and not mathematics as pure formalism — but something closer to what physics once called natural philosophy.

Why I was always uncomfortable

For a long time, I could not quite place my discomfort. I was uneasy with mainstream Standard Model theorists — not because their work lacks brilliance or empirical success (it clearly does not), but because formal success increasingly seemed to substitute for ontological clarity. At the same time, I felt equally uneasy among outsiders and “fringe” thinkers, who were often too eager to replace one elaborate ontology with another, convinced that the establishment had simply missed the obvious.

I now think I understand why I could not belong comfortably to either camp. Both, in different ways, tend to underestimate what went into building the Standard Model in the first place.

The Standard Model is not just a theory. It is the result of enormous societal investment (yes, taxes matter), decades of engineering ingenuity, and entire academic ecosystems built around measurement, refinement, and internal consistency. One does not wave that away lightly. Criticizing it without acknowledging that effort is not radical — it is careless.
At the same time, acknowledging that effort does not oblige one to treat the resulting ontology as final. Formal closure is not the same thing as physical understanding.

That tension — respect without reverence — is where I found myself stuck.

Seeing versus calculating

The paper I just uploaded does not attempt to overthrow the Standard Model, nor to replace ΛCDM, nor to propose a new unification. It does something much more modest: it tries to separate what we can physically interpret from what we can formally manipulate.

That distinction was central to the worries of people like Albert Einstein, long before it became unfashionable to worry about such things. Einstein’s famous remark to Max Born — “God does not play dice” — was not a rejection of probability as a calculational tool. It was an expression of discomfort with mistaking a formalism for a description of reality. Something similar motivated Louis de Broglie, and later thinkers who never quite accepted that interpretation should be outsourced entirely to mathematics.

What my paper argues — cautiously, and without claiming finality — is that much of modern physics suffers from a kind of ontological drift: symmetries that began life as mathematical operations sometimes came to be treated as physical mandates.

When those symmetries fail, new quantum numbers, charges, or conservation laws are introduced to restore formal order. This works extraordinarily well — but it also risks confusing bookkeeping with explanation.

Matter, antimatter, and restraint

The most difficult part of the paper concerns matter–antimatter creation and annihilation. For a long time, I resisted interpretations that treated charge as something that could simply appear or disappear. That resistance did not lead me to invent hidden reservoirs or speculative intermediates — on the contrary, I explicitly rejected such moves as ontological inflation. Instead, I left the tension open.

Only later did I realize that insisting on charge as a substance may itself have been an unjustified metaphor. Letting go of that metaphor did not solve everything — but it did restore coherence without adding entities. That pattern — refusing both cheap dismissal and cheap solutions — now feels like the right one.

Ambition, patience, and time

We live in a period of extraordinary measurement and, paradoxically, diminished understanding. Data accumulates. Precision improves. Parameters are refined. But the underlying picture often becomes more fragmented rather than more unified.

New machines may or may not be built. China may or may not build the next CERN. That is largely beyond the control of individual thinkers. What is within reach is the slower task of making sense of what we already know. That task does not reward ambition. It rewards patience.

This is also where I part ways — gently, but firmly — with some bright younger thinkers and some older, semi-wise ones. Not because they are wrong in detail, but because they sometimes underestimate the weight of history, infrastructure, and collective effort behind the theories they critique or attempt to replace. Time will tell whether their alternatives mature. Time always tells :-). […] PS: I add a ‘smiley’ here because, perhaps, that is the most powerful phrase of all in this post.

A pause, not a conclusion

This paper may mark the end of my own physics quest — or at least a pause. Not because everything is resolved, but because I finally understand why I could neither fully accept nor fully reject what I was given. I don’t feel compelled anymore to choose sides. I can respect the Standard Model without canonizing it, and I can question it without trying to dethrone it. I can accept that some questions may remain open, not because we lack data, but because clarity sometimes requires restraint.

For now, that feels like enough. Time to get back on the bike. 🙂

PS: Looking back at earlier philosophical notes I wrote years ago — for instance on the relation between form, substance, and charge — I’m struck less by how “wrong” they were than by how unfinished they remained. The questions were already there; what was missing was discipline. Not more speculation, but sharper restraint.

We Could Have Stopped There Too

(But the Question About Annihilation Would Not Stay Quiet)

In a previous post, I wrote that we could stop here — after revisiting the photon wavefunction and trying to say, as carefully as possible, what such a wavefunction might represent in physical reality rather than merely in calculation. That paper already felt like a natural resting point: the mathematics was consistent, the interpretation restrained, and the temptation to add speculative layers had been resisted.

But, as often happens, the very act of stopping made the next question louder.

If one is willing to take wavefunctions seriously — not as mystical probability clouds but as structured representations of physical processes — then one cannot avoid revisiting an older and more uncomfortable puzzle: matter–antimatter pair creation and annihilation. In particular, the question that has bothered me for years refused to go away:

What, exactly, happens to electric charge in electron–positron annihilation?

In January 2025, I wrote a paper on this topic together with ChatGPT-4.0. That version deliberately stopped short of resolution. It explored wavefunctional representations, respected global conservation laws, and openly admitted that familiar intuitions about charge seemed to fail locally. I resisted easy exits: latent charge states, hidden reservoirs, or metaphysical bookkeeping devices introduced only to preserve comfort.

At the time, that felt honest enough.

What changed since then is not the question, but the discipline with which I was forced to re-examine my own assumptions.

Over the past months, continued work with a more advanced AI system (ChatGPT-5.2), across many iterations and with partial memory of prior discussions, introduced a form of pressure that was unfamiliar but productive. The AI did not argue for a competing ontology. Instead, it kept doing something more unsettling: it repeatedly asked why certain assumptions were still being carried along at all.

In hindsight, I can see that I was still clinging — subconsciously — to the idea that charge must be something that persists, even if I no longer knew where to put it. That assumption had survived earlier criticism not because it was well-justified, but because it was deeply ingrained.

What finally shifted the balance was a stricter application of Occam’s razor — applied not to equations, but to ontological commitments. If charge is inseparable from a specific physical organization (of motion, phase, and localization), then insisting that it must survive the dissolution of that organization is not conservative reasoning. It is surplus.

This led, reluctantly but unavoidably, to a provisional reformulation: perhaps charge is not a substance that must “go somewhere,” but a mode of organization that ceases to exist when the organization itself dissolves. This idea is not offered as a new metaphysical doctrine. On the contrary, it emerged as a refusal to introduce additional entities whose only role would be to save intuition.

The revised paper therefore appears in two parts. The January version is preserved intact, as a record of where the reasoning stood at that time. The new December revision does not correct it so much as re-read it under harsher criteria of conceptual economy. Several distinctions — including the boson–fermion divide — remain descriptively useful, but are relieved of explanatory burdens they were never meant to carry.

As before, no final answers are claimed. The ontological and philosophical implications are intentionally left for the reader — real or imaginary — to judge. The role of AI in this process was not to supply insight, but to apply relentless pressure against conceptual inertia. Any logical errors or unwarranted commitments that remain are mine alone, even if much of the textual consistency was produced by artificial means.

We could, perhaps, stop here as well.

But I have learned to be suspicious of that feeling. When a question keeps knocking, it is usually because something unnecessary is still being held onto — and is asking to be let go.

We Could Stop Here.

(But the Next Question Is Already Knocking.)

There is a moment in any long intellectual journey where you could stop.

Not because everything is finished, but because enough has settled to make stopping respectable. The equations close. The concepts line up. Nothing is obviously broken anymore.

This paper — The Photon Wavefunction Revisited — marks one of those moments for me.

👉 The paper is available here on ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399111974_The_Photon_Wavefunction_Revisited

It revisits an old and stubborn question — what do we really mean by the photon wavefunction? — using only very old tools: Maxwell’s equations, the Planck–Einstein relation, dimensional analysis, and known scattering results. No new particles. No speculative fields. No hidden dimensions. No “next revolution”.

Just careful rereading.

Why revisit this at all?

Because physics has a habit of answering questions so efficiently that we stop asking what the answers mean. The photon became a “quantum of the electromagnetic field”, calculations worked, experiments agreed — and interpretation quietly retreated.

But interpretation has a way of sneaking back in through the side door.

In this paper, I try to be very explicit about what is being claimed — and what is not:

A photon is treated as a light-like, phase-closed object, not as a little billiard ball and not as a probabilistic smear.
Its wavefunction is not a mystery object “without meaning”, but a compact encoding of phase structure.
Electric and magnetic fields are not competing realities, but orthogonal phase components of a single conserved structure.
Energy and momentum conservation follow cleanly from Maxwell’s equations — even when charge is stripped away.

Nothing here overturns quantum electrodynamics. But some things are, perhaps, put back in their original place.

A word about standing waves (and why they appear)

One appendix uses a standing-wave construction to make something visible that is otherwise hidden: how electric and magnetic field energy exchange internally while total energy remains conserved.

This does not mean photons are standing waves. They propagate in one direction. Momentum has a direction. Energy does not.

The standing wave is simply a diagnostic tool — a way of freezing momentum flow so the bookkeeping of energy becomes transparent. If that sounds almost embarrassingly classical… well, that may be the point.

Why this felt worth publishing

This paper took shape slowly, through many iterations, many dead ends, and many “wait — is that actually true?” moments. Some of it was developed with explicit AI assistance, used not as an oracle but as a very patient consistency checker. That role is openly acknowledged.

What mattered most to me was not novelty, but coherence.

When the dust settled, something quietly reassuring happened: the picture that emerged was simpler than what I started with, not more complicated.

And that’s usually a good sign.

Could we stop here?

Yes. Absolutely.

The paper stands on its own. The equations close. Nothing essential is missing.

But physics has never progressed by stopping at “good enough”. The next question is already there:

How exactly does this phase picture illuminate electron–photon interaction?
What does it really say about the fine-structure constant?
Where does this leave matter–antimatter symmetry?

Those are not answered here. They don’t need to be — yet.

For now, this is a place to pause, look around, and make sure we know where we are.

And then, as always, the next question prompts the next question.

That’s not a problem.
That’s the fun part.

— Jean Louis Van Belle

Post Scriptum: The Last Question That Won’t Let Me Sleep (On matter, antimatter, and why one mystery remains)

There is a strange pattern I’ve noticed over the years.

You work your way through a dense thicket of questions. One by one, they loosen. Concepts that once felt contradictory begin to align. The mathematics stops fighting the intuition. The ontology — cautiously, provisionally — starts to hold.

And then, when almost everything is in place, one question refuses to dissolve.

Tonight, for me, that question is matter–antimatter creation and annihilation.

Most things now feel… settled

After revisiting photons, wavefunctions, phase closure, and electromagnetic energy bookkeeping, I feel unusually calm about many things that once bothered me deeply.

Photons as light-like, phase-closed objects? That works.
Electric and magnetic fields as orthogonal phase components? That works.
Energy conservation without charge? Maxwell already knew how to do that.
Electron–photon interaction as phase reconfiguration rather than “mystical coupling”? That works too.

None of this feels revolutionary anymore. It feels readable.

And yet.

Matter–antimatter still feels different

In low-energy environments, I’m increasingly comfortable with a very unromantic picture.

Pair creation does not happen “out of nothing.” It happens near nuclei, in strong fields, in structured environments. Something must anchor phase. Something must absorb recoil. Something must allow a stable oscillatory configuration to form.

I’ve sometimes called this a Platzwechsel — a change of place, or role — rather than a miraculous transformation of field into charge. The photon doesn’t “become matter”; a charge configuration re-closes in the presence of structure.

That feels honest. And it fits what experiments actually show.

But then there is the “but” question… This is how I phrase now.

Annihilation is unsettlingly easy

Electron–positron annihilation, on the other hand, requires no such help.

Two charged, massive objects meet, and they disappear into light. Cleanly. Elegantly. No nucleus. No lattice. No scaffold.

That asymmetry matters.

Matter → light is easy.
Light → matter is hard.

Quantum field theory encodes this perfectly well, but encoding is not explaining. And pretending the asymmetry isn’t there has never helped.

What happens to charge?

Here is the thought that keeps me awake — and oddly calm at the same time.

If charge is not a substance, but a phase-closed electromagnetic motion, then annihilation is not mysterious at all. The phase closure simply dissolves. What remains is free phase propagation.

Charge doesn’t “go anywhere”.
It stops being a thing because the structure that constituted it no longer exists.

That idea is unsettling only if one insists that charge must persist locally as a substance. I’ve never found good reasons to believe that.

And pure vacuum pair creation?

High-energy photon–photon pair creation is possible, in principle. But it is rare, fragile, and structurally demanding. It requires extreme energies and densities, and often still some form of external assistance.

That, too, feels telling.

Two freely propagating phase objects have no natural way to decide where a charge configuration should live. Without structure, closure is unstable. Nature seems reluctant — not forbidden, but reluctant.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves me in an oddly peaceful place.

Most of the framework now feels coherent. The remaining mystery is not a loose end to be tied up quickly, but a boundary — a place where explanation must slow down instead of speeding up.

That feels like the right place to stop for tonight.

Not because the mystery is solved, but because it is now cleanly stated.

And that, I’ve learned, is often the real precondition for sleep.

— Jean Louis Van Belle

When Decay Statistics Become Ontology

Or: why the Standard Model feels so solid — and yet so strangely unsatisfying

I recently put a new paper online: A Taxonomy of Instability. It is, in some sense, a “weird” piece. Not because it proposes new particles, forces, or mechanisms — it does none of that — but because it deliberately steps sideways from the usual question:

What are particles made of?

and asks instead:

How do unstable physical configurations actually fail?

This shift sounds modest. In practice, it leads straight into a conceptual fault line that most of us sense, but rarely articulate.

What is actually being classified in particle physics?

The Standard Model is extraordinarily successful. That is not in dispute. It predicts decay rates, cross sections, and branching fractions with astonishing precision. It has survived decades of experimental scrutiny.

But it is worth noticing what it is most directly successful at describing:

lifetimes,
branching ratios,
observable decay patterns.

In other words: statistics of instability.

Yet when we talk about the Standard Model, we almost immediately slide from that statistical success into an ontological picture: particles as entities with intrinsic properties, decaying “randomly” according to fundamental laws.

That slide is so familiar that it usually goes unnoticed.

The quiet assumption we almost never examine

Consider how decay is presented in standard references (PDG tables are the cleanest example). For a given unstable particle, we are shown:

a list of decay “channels”,
each with a fixed branching fraction,
averaged over production mechanisms, environments, and detectors.

Everything contextual has been stripped away.

What remains is treated as intrinsic.

And here is where a subtle but radical assumption enters:

The same unstable particle is taken to be capable of realizing multiple, structurally distinct decay reactions, with no further individuation required.

This is not an experimental result.
It is an interpretive stance.

As long as one stays in calculational mode, this feels unproblematic. The formalism works. The predictions are right.

The discomfort only arises when one asks a very basic question:

If all environment variables are abstracted away, what exactly is it that is decaying?

Statistical determinism sharpens the problem

Decay statistics are not noisy or unstable. They are:

reproducible,
environment-independent (within stated limits),
stable across experiments.

That makes them look law-like.

But law-like behavior demands clarity about what level of description the law applies to.

There are two logically distinct possibilities:

Intrinsic multivalence
A single physical entity genuinely has multiple, mutually exclusive decay behaviors, realized stochastically, with no deeper individuation.
Hidden population structure
What we call “a particle” is actually an equivalence class of near-identical configurations, each with a preferred instability route, unresolved by our current classification.

The Standard Model chooses option (1) — implicitly, pragmatically, and very effectively.

But nothing in the data forces that choice.

Why this can feel like being “duped”

Many people only experience discomfort after they start thinking carefully about what the Standard Model is claiming to describe.

The sense of being “duped” does not come from experimental failure — it comes from realizing that a philosophical commitment was made silently, without being labeled as such.

Probability, in this framework, is not treated as epistemic (what we don’t know), but as ontologically primitive (what is). Identity is divorced from behavior. The ensemble description quietly replaces individual determinism.

This is a perfectly legitimate move — but it is a move.

And it has a cost.

What my taxonomy does — and does not — claim

A Taxonomy of Instability does not propose new physics. It does not challenge the predictive success of the Standard Model. It does not deny quantum mechanics.

What it does is much quieter:

it treats decay landscapes, not particles, as the primary objects of classification;
it groups unstable configurations by how they fail, not by assumed internal structure;
it keeps the description strictly operational: lifetimes, observable final states, branching structure.

In doing so, it exposes something we usually gloss over:

Treating statistically distinct instability morphologies as attributes of a single identity is already an ontological decision.

Once that decision is made explicit, it becomes optional rather than compulsory.

Why this feels “weird” — and why that’s a good sign

The paper feels strange because it does not do what most theoretical work does:

it does not explain,
it does not unify,
it does not speculate about deeper mechanisms.

Instead, it asks whether our classification layer has quietly hardened into ontology.

That kind of question always feels uncomfortable, because it sits between theory and philosophy, and because it removes a tacit compromise rather than proposing a new belief.

But it is also the kind of question that matters precisely when a theory works extremely well.

A broader resonance (human and artificial)

There is an additional reason this question feels timely.

Modern AI systems are, at their core, pattern classifiers and compressors. They turn data into “things” by grouping outcomes under labels. Ontologies emerge automatically unless we are careful.

Seen from that angle, particle physics is not an outlier — it is an early, highly successful example of how statistical regularities become reified as entities.

The taxonomy I propose is not only about particles. It is about how thinking systems — human or artificial — turn data into objects.

A calm conclusion

The Standard Model is an extraordinarily successful theory of decay statistics. Its difficulties are not primarily empirical, but philosophical.

Those difficulties arise only when we forget that:

classification is not explanation,
identity is not forced by statistics,
and ontology is not delivered for free by predictive success.

My hope is not to replace any existing framework, but to invite both human readers and artificial “thinking machines” to pause and ask again:

What is being measured — and what, exactly, are we saying exists?

Sometimes, the most productive form of progress is not adding a new layer, but noticing where an old one quietly became invisible.

Stability, Instability, and What High-Energy Physics Really Teaches Us

One of the recurring temptations in physics is to mistake violence for depth.

When we push matter to extreme energy densities—whether in particle colliders or in thought experiments about the early universe—we tend to believe we are peeling away layers of reality, discovering ever more “fundamental” constituents beneath the familiar surface of stable matter. The shorter-lived and more exotic a state is, the more “real” it sometimes appears to us.

In my most recent RG paper (Lecture X1), I tried to step back from that reflex.

The starting point is almost embarrassingly simple:
stable charged particles persist; unstable ones do not.
That fact alone already carries a surprising amount of explanatory power—if we resist the urge to overinterpret it.

Stability as the exception, not the rule

If we imagine the early universe as a high-energy, high-density environment—a kind of primordial soup—then instability is not mysterious at all. Under such conditions, long-lived, self-consistent structures should be rare. Most configurations would be fleeting, short-lived, unable to maintain their identity.

From this perspective, stable particles are not “primitive building blocks” in a metaphysical sense. They are low-energy survivors: configurations that remain coherent once the universe cools and energetic chaos subsides.

Stability, then, is not something that needs to be explained away. It is the phenomenon that needs to be accounted for.

Colliders as stress tests, not ontological excavations

Modern facilities such as CERN allow us to recreate, for fleeting moments, energy densities that no longer exist naturally in the present universe. What we observe there—resonances, decay chains, short-lived states—is fascinating and deeply informative.

But there is a subtle conceptual shift that often goes unnoticed.

These experiments do not necessarily reveal deeper layers of being. They may instead be doing something more modest and more honest: testing how known structures fail under extreme conditions.

In that sense, unstable high-energy states are not more fundamental than stable ones. They are what stability looks like when it is pushed beyond its limits.

A simpler cosmological intuition

Seen this way, cosmogenesis does not require an ever-growing menagerie of proto-entities. A universe that begins hot and dense will naturally favor instability. As it cools, only a small number of configurations will remain phase-coherent and persistent.

Those are the particles we still see today.

No exotic metaphysics is required—only the recognition that persistence is meaningful.

Were the mega-projects worth it?

This perspective does not diminish the value of large-scale scientific projects. On the contrary.

The enormous investments behind colliders or fusion experiments—think of projects like ITER—have given us something invaluable: empirical certainty. They confirmed, with extraordinary precision, intuitions already sensed by the giants of the early twentieth century—figures like Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger.

Perhaps the deepest outcome of these projects is not that they uncovered a hidden zoo of ultimate constituents, but that they showed how remarkably robust the basic structure of physics already was.

That, too, is progress.

Knowing when not to add layers

Physics advances not only by adding entities and mechanisms, but also by learning when not to do so. Sometimes clarity comes from subtraction rather than accumulation.

If nothing else, the simple distinction between stable and unstable charged particles reminds us of this: reality does not owe us an ever-deeper ontology just because we can afford to build more powerful machines.

And perhaps that realization—quiet, unglamorous, but honest—is one of the most valuable lessons high-energy physics has taught us.

This reflection builds directly on an earlier blog post, “Stability First: A Personal Programme for Re-reading Particle Physics” (18 December 2025), in which I outlined a deliberate shift in emphasis: away from ontological layering and towards persistence as a physical criterion. That post introduced the motivation behind Lecture X1—not as a challenge to established data or formalisms, but as an invitation to reread them through a simpler lens. What follows can be read as a continuation of that programme: an attempt to see whether the basic distinction between stable and unstable charged particles already carries more explanatory weight than we usually grant it.

Post Scriptum — An empirical follow-up

When I wrote this piece, the emphasis was deliberately conceptual. The central idea was to treat stability versus instability as a primary organizing perspective, rather than starting from particle families, quark content, or other internal classifications. At the time, I explicitly presented this as an intuition — something that felt structurally right, but that still needed to be confronted with data in a disciplined way.

That confrontation has now been carried out.

Using the Particle Data Group listings as a source, I constructed a deliberately minimalist dataset containing only two observables: rest mass and lifetime. All a priori particle classifications were excluded. Stable or asymptotic states were removed, as were fractionally charged entities, leaving an unclassified ensemble of unstable particles. The resulting mass–lifetime landscape was examined in logarithmic coordinates and subjected to density-based clustering, with the full data table included to allow independent reanalysis.

The outcome is modest, but instructive. A dominant continuum of prompt decays clearly emerges, accompanied by only weak additional structure at longer lifetimes. No rich taxonomy presents itself when decay behaviour alone is considered — but the clusters that do appear are real, reproducible, and consistent with the intuition developed here and in earlier work.

This empirical annex does not “prove” a new theory, nor does it challenge existing classifications. Its value lies elsewhere: it shows what survives when one strips the description down to observables alone, and it clarifies both the power and the limits of a stability-first perspective.

For readers interested in seeing how these ideas behave when confronted with actual data — and in re-using that data themselves — the empirical follow-up is available here:

👉 Empirical Annex to Lecture X1 (Revisiting Lecture XV)
Structure in the Energy–Lifetime Plane of Unstable PDG Particles
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399008132_Empirical_Annex_to_Lecture_X1_Revisiting_Lecture_XV_Structure_in_the_Energy-Lifetime_Plane_of_Unstable_PDG_Particles

Sometimes, the most useful result is not a spectacular confirmation, but a careful consistency check that tells us where intuition holds — and where it stops.

Stability First: A Personal Programme for Re-reading Particle Physics

Over the past years, I have written a number of papers on physics—mostly exploratory, sometimes speculative, always driven by the same underlying discomfort.

Not with the results of modern physics. Those are extraordinary.
But with the ordering of its explanations.

We are very good at calculating what happens.
We are less clear about why some things persist and others do not.

That question—why stability appears where it does—has quietly guided much of my thinking. It is also the thread that ties together a new manuscript I have just published on ResearchGate:

“Manuscript v0.2 – A stability-first reinterpretation of particle physics”
👉 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398839393_Manuscript_v02

This post is not a summary of the manuscript. It is an explanation of why I wrote it, and what kind of work it is meant to enable.

Not a new theory — a different starting point

Let me be clear from the outset.

This manuscript does not propose a new theory.
It does not challenge the empirical success of the Standard Model.
It does not attempt to replace quantum field theory or nuclear phenomenology.

What it does is much more modest—and, I hope, more durable.

It asks whether we have been starting our explanations at the wrong end.

Instead of beginning with abstract constituents and symmetries, the manuscript begins with something far more pedestrian, yet physically decisive:

Persistence in time.

Some entities last.
Some decay.
Some exist only fleetingly as resonances.
Some are stable only in the presence of others.

Those differences are not cosmetic. They shape the physical world we actually inhabit.

From electrons to nuclei: stability as a guide

The manuscript proceeds slowly and deliberately, revisiting familiar ground:

the electron, as an intrinsically stable mode;
the proton, as a geometrically stable but structurally richer object;
the neutron, as a metastable configuration whose stability exists only in relation;
the deuteron, as the simplest genuinely collective equilibrium;
and nuclear matter, where stability becomes distributed across many coupled degrees of freedom.

At no point is new empirical content introduced.
What changes is the interpretive emphasis.

Stability is treated not as an afterthought, but as a physical clue.

Interaction without mysticism

The same approach is applied to interaction.

Scattering and annihilation are reinterpreted not as abstract probabilistic events, but as temporary departures from equilibrium and mode conversion between matter-like and light-like regimes.

Nothing in the standard calculations is altered.
What is altered is the physical picture.

Wavefunctions remain indispensable—but they are treated as representations of physical configurations, not as substitutes for them.

Probability emerges naturally from limited access to phase, geometry, and configuration, rather than from assumed ontological randomness.

Why classification matters

The manuscript ultimately turns to the Particle Data Group catalogue.

The PDG tables are one of the great achievements of modern physics. But they are optimized for calculation, not for intuition about persistence.

The manuscript proposes a complementary, stability-first index of the same data:

intrinsically stable modes,
metastable particle modes,
prompt decayers,
resonances,
and context-dependent stability (such as neutrons in nuclei).

Nothing is removed.
Nothing is denied.

The proposal is simply to read the catalogue as a map of stability regimes, rather than as a flat ontology of “fundamental particles”.

A programme statement, not a conclusion

This manuscript is intentionally incomplete.

It does not contain the “real work” of re-classifying the entire PDG catalogue. That work lies ahead and will take time, iteration, and—no doubt—many corrections.

What the manuscript provides is something else:

a programme statement.

A clear declaration of what kind of questions I think are still worth asking in particle physics, and why stability—rather than constituent bookkeeping—may be the right place to ask them from.

Why I am sharing this now

I am publishing this manuscript not as a final product, but as a marker.

A marker of a line of thought I intend to pursue seriously.
A marker of a way of reading familiar physics that I believe remains underexplored.
And an invitation to discussion—especially critical discussion—on whether this stability-first perspective is useful, coherent, or ultimately untenable.

Physics progresses by calculation.
It matures by interpretation.

This manuscript belongs to the second category.

If that resonates with you, you may find the full text of interest.

Jean-Louis Van Belle
readingfeynman.org

Something Rotten in the State of QED? A Careful Look at Critique, Sociology, and the Limits of Modern Physics

Every few years, a paper comes along that stirs discomfort — not because it is wrong, but because it touches a nerve.
Oliver Consa’s “Something is rotten in the state of QED” is one of those papers.

It is not a technical QED calculation.
It is a polemic: a long critique of renormalization, historical shortcuts, convenient coincidences, and suspiciously good matches between theory and experiment. Consa argues that QED’s foundations were improvised, normalized, mythologized, and finally institutionalized into a polished narrative that glosses over its original cracks.

This is an attractive story.
Too attractive, perhaps.
So instead of reacting emotionally — pro or contra — I decided to dissect the argument with a bit of help.

At my request, an AI language model (“Iggy”) assisted in the analysis. Not to praise me. Not to flatter Consa. Not to perform tricks.
Simply to act as a scalpel: cold, precise, and unafraid to separate structure from rhetoric.

This post is the result.

1. What Consa gets right (and why it matters)

Let’s begin with the genuinely valuable parts of his argument.

a) Renormalization unease is legitimate

Dirac, Feynman, Dyson, and others really did express deep dissatisfaction with renormalization. “Hocus-pocus” was not a joke; it was a confession.

Early QED involved:

cutoff procedures pulled out of thin air,
infinities subtracted by fiat,
and the philosophical hope that “the math will work itself out later.”

It did work out later — to some extent — but the conceptual discomfort remains justified. I share that discomfort. There is something inelegant about infinities everywhere.

b) Scientific sociology is real

The post-war era centralized experimental and institutional power in a way physics had never seen. Prestige, funding, and access influenced what got published and what was ignored. Not a conspiracy — just sociology.

Consa is right to point out that real science is messier than textbook linearity.

c) The g–2 tension is real

The ongoing discrepancy between experiment and the Standard Model is not fringe. It is one of the defining questions in particle physics today.

On these points, Consa is a useful corrective:
he reminds us to stay honest about historical compromises and conceptual gaps.

2. Where Consa overreaches

But critique is one thing; accusation is another.

Consa repeatedly moves from:

“QED evolved through trial and error”
to
“QED is essentially fraud.”

This jump is unjustified.

a) Messiness ≠ manipulation

Early QED calculations were ugly. They were corrected decades later. Experiments did shift. Error bars did move.

That is simply how science evolves.

The fact that a 1947 calculation doesn’t match a 1980 value is not evidence of deceit — it is evidence of refinement. Consa collapses that distinction.

b) Ignoring the full evidence landscape

He focuses almost exclusively on:

the Lamb shift,
the electron g–2,
the muon g–2.

Important numbers, yes — but QED’s experimental foundation is vastly broader:

scattering cross-sections,
vacuum polarization,
atomic spectra,
collider data,
running of α, etc.

You cannot judge an entire theory on two or three benchmarks.

c) Underestimating theoretical structure

QED is not “fudge + diagrams.”
It is constrained by:

Lorentz invariance,
gauge symmetry,
locality,
renormalizability.

Even if we dislike the mathematical machinery, the structure is not arbitrary.

So: Consa reveals real cracks, but then paints the entire edifice as rotten.
That is unjustified.

3. A personal aside: the Zitter Institute and the danger of counter-churches

For a time, I was nominally associated with the Zitter Institute — a loosely organized group exploring alternatives to mainstream quantum theory, including zitterbewegung-based particle models.

I now would like to distance myself.

Not because alternative models are unworthy — quite the opposite. But because I instinctively resist:

strong internal identity,
suspicion of outsiders,
rhetorical overreach,
selective reading of evidence,
and occasional dogmatism about their own preferred models.

If we criticize mainstream physics for ad hoc factors, we must be brutal about our own.

Alternative science is not automatically cleaner science.

4. Two emails from 2020: why good scientists can’t always engage

This brings me to two telling exchanges from 2020 with outstanding experimentalists: Prof. Randolf Pohl (muonic hydrogen) and Prof. Ashot Gasparian (PRad).

Both deserve enormous respect, and I won’t reveal the email exchanges because of respect, GDPR rules or whatever).
Both email exchanges revealed the true bottleneck in modern physics to me — it is not intelligence, not malice, but sociology and bandwidth.

a) Randolf Pohl: polite skepticism, institutional gravity

Pohl was kind but firm:

He saw the geometric relations I proposed as numerology.
He questioned applicability to other particles.
He emphasized the conservatism of CODATA logic.

Perfectly valid.
Perfectly respectable.
But also… perfectly bound by institutional norms.

His answer was thoughtful — and constrained.
(Source: ChatGPT analysis of emails with Prof Dr Pohl)

b) Ashot Gasparian: warm support, but no bandwidth

Gasparian responded warmly:

“Certainly your approach and the numbers are interesting.”
But: “We are very busy with the next experiment.”

Also perfectly valid.
And revealing:
even curious, open-minded scientists cannot afford to explore conceptual alternatives.

Their world runs on deadlines, graduate students, collaborations, grants.

(Source: ChatGPT analysis of emails with Prof Dr Pohl)

The lesson

Neither professor dismissed the ideas because they were nonsensical.
They simply had no institutional space to pursue them.

That is the quiet truth:
the bottleneck is not competence, but structure.

5. Why I now use AI as an epistemic partner

This brings me to the role of AI.

Some colleagues (including members of the Zitter Institute) look down on using AI in foundational research. They see it as cheating, or unserious, or threatening to their identity as “outsiders.”

But here is the irony:

AI is exactly the tool that can think speculatively without career risk.

An AI:

has no grant committee,
no publication pressure,
no academic identity to defend,
no fear of being wrong,
no need to “fit in.”

That makes it ideal for exploratory ontology-building.

Occasionally, as in the recent paper I co-wrote with Iggy — “The Wonderful Theory of Light and Matter” — it becomes the ideal partner:

human intuition + machine coherence,
real-space modeling without metaphysical inflation,
EM + relativity as a unified playground,
photons, electrons, protons, neutrons as geometric EM systems.

This is not a replacement for science.
It is a tool for clearing conceptual ground,
where overworked, over-constrained academic teams cannot go.

6. So… is something rotten in QED?

Yes — but not what you think.

What’s rotten is the mismatch

between:

the myth of QED as a perfectly clean, purely elegant theory,
and
the reality of improvised renormalization, historical accidents, social inertia, and conceptual discomfort.

What’s rotten is not the theory itself,
but the story we tell about it.

What’s not rotten:

the intelligence of the researchers,
the honesty of experimentalists,
the hard-won precision of modern measurements.

QED is extraordinary.
But it is not infallible, nor philosophically complete, nor conceptually finished.

And that is fine.

The problem is not messiness.
The problem is pretending that messiness is perfection.

7. What I propose instead

My own program — pursued slowly over many years — is simple:

Bring physics back to Maxwell + relativity as the foundation.
Build real-space geometrical models of all fundamental particles.
Reject unnecessary “forces” invented to patch conceptual holes.
Hold both mainstream and alternative models to the same standard:
no ad hoc constants, no magic, no metaphysics.

And — unusually —
use AI as a cognitive tool, not as an oracle.

Let the machine check coherence.
Let the human set ontology.

If something emerges from the dialogue — good.
If not — also good.

But at least we will be thinking honestly again.

Conclusion

Something is rotten in the state of QED, yes —
but the rot is not fraud or conspiracy.

It is the quiet decay of intellectual honesty behind polished narratives.

The cure is not shouting louder, or forming counter-churches, or romanticizing outsider science.

The cure is precision,
clarity,
geometry,
and the courage to say:

Let’s look again — without myth, without prestige, without fear.

If AI can help with that, all the better.

— Jean Louis Van Belle
(with conceptual assistance from “Iggy,” used intentionally as a scalpel rather than a sycophant)

Post-scriptum: Why the Electron–Proton Model Matters (and Why Dirac Would Nod)

A brief personal note — and a clarification that goes beyond Consa, beyond QED, and beyond academic sociology.

One of the few conceptual compasses I trust in foundational physics is a remark by Paul Dirac. Reflecting on Schrödinger’s “zitterbewegung” hypothesis, he wrote:

“One must believe in this consequence of the theory,
since other consequences which are inseparably bound up with it,
such as the law of scattering of light by an electron,
are confirmed by experiment.”

Dirac’s point is not mysticism.
It is methodological discipline:

If a theoretical structure has unavoidable consequences, and
some of those consequences match experiment precisely,
then even the unobservable parts of the structure deserve consideration.

This matters because the real-space electron and proton models I’ve been working on over the years — now sharpened through AI–human dialogue — meet that exact criterion.

They are not metaphors, nor numerology, nor free speculation.
They force specific, testable, non-trivial predictions:

a confined EM oscillation for the electron, with radius fixed by $\hbar / m_e c$ ;
a “photon-like” orbital speed for its point-charge center;
a distributed (not pointlike) charge cloud for the proton, enforced by mass ratio, stability, form factors, and magnetic moment;
natural emergence of the measured $G_E/G_M$ discrepancy;
and a geometric explanation of deuteron binding that requires no new force.

None of these are optional.
They fall out of the internal logic of the model.
And several — electron scattering, Compton behavior, proton radius, form-factor trends — are empirically confirmed.

Dirac’s rule applies:

When inseparable consequences match experiment,
the underlying mechanism deserves to be taken seriously —
whether or not it fits the dominant vocabulary.

This post is not the place to develop those models in detail; that will come in future pieces and papers.
But it felt important to state why I keep returning to them — and why they align with a style of reasoning that values:

geometry,
energy densities,
charge motion,
conservation laws,
and the 2019 SI foundations of $h$ , $e$ , and $c$
over metaphysical categories and ad-hoc forces.

Call it minimalism.
Call it stubbornness.
Call it a refusal to multiply entities beyond necessity.

For me — and for anyone sympathetic to Dirac’s way of thinking — it is simply physics.

— JL (with “Iggy” (AI) in the wings)

A New Attempt at a Simple Theory of Light and Matter

Dear Reader,

Every now and then a question returns with enough insistence that it demands a fresh attempt at an answer. For me, that question has always been: can we make sense of fundamental physics without multiplying entities beyond necessity? Can we explain light, matter, and their interactions without inventing forces that have no clear definition, or particles whose properties feel more like placeholders than physical reality?

Today, I posted a new paper on ResearchGate that attempts to do exactly that:

“The Wonderful Theory of Light and Matter”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398123696_The_Wonderful_Theory_of_Light_and_Matter

It is the result of an unusual collaboration: myself and an artificial intelligence (“Iggy”), working through the conceptual structure of photons, electrons, and protons with the only tool that has ever mattered to me in physics — Occam’s Razor.

No metaphysics.
No dimensionless abstractions.
No “magical” forces.

Just:

electromagnetic oscillations,
quantized action,
real geometries in real space,
and the recognition that many so-called mysteries dissolve once we stop introducing layers that nature never asked for.

The photon is treated as a linear electromagnetic oscillation obeying the Planck–Einstein relation.
The electron as a circular oscillation, with a real radius and real angular momentum.
The proton (and later, the neutron and deuteron) as systems we must understand through charge distributions, not fictional quarks that never leave their equations.

None of this “solves physics,” of course.
But it does something useful: it clears conceptual ground.

And unexpectedly, the collaboration itself became a kind of experiment:
what happens when human intuition and machine coherence try to reason with absolute precision, without hiding behind jargon or narrative?

The result is the paper linked above.
Make of it what you will.

As always: no claims of authority.
Just exploration, clarity where possible, and honesty where clarity fails.

If the questions interest you, or if the model bothers you enough to critique it, then the paper has succeeded in its only purpose: provoking real thought.

Warm regards,
Jean Louis Van Belle

🌀 Two Annexes and a Turtle: Revisiting My Early Lectures on Quantum Physics

Over the past few weeks — and more intensely these past mornings — I’ve returned to two of my earliest texts in the Lectures on Physics series: the first on quantum behavior, and the second on probability amplitudes and quantum interference. Both have now been updated with new annexes, co-authored in dialogue with ChatGPT-4o.

This wasn’t just a consistency check. It was something more interesting: an exercise in thinking with — not through — a reasoning machine.

The first annex (Revisiting the Mystery of the Muon and Tau) tackles the open question I left hanging in Lecture I: how to interpret unstable “generations” of matter-particles like the muon and tau. In the original paper, I proposed a realist model where mass is not an intrinsic property but the result of oscillating charge or field energy — a stance that draws support from the 2019 revision of SI units, which grounded the kilogram in Planck’s constant and the speed of light. That change wasn’t just a technicality; it was a silent shift in ontology. I suspected that much at the time, but now — working through the implications with a well-tuned AI — I can state it more clearly: mass is geometry, inertia is field structure, and the difference between stable and unstable particles might be a matter of topological harmony.

The second annex (Interference, Identity, and the Imaginary Unit) reopens the deeper riddle at the heart of quantum mechanics: why probability amplitudes interfere at all. This annex is the child of years of irritation — visible in earlier, sharper essays I published on academia.edu — with the lazy mysticism that often surrounds “common phase factors.” The breakthrough, for me, was to fully accept the imaginary unit iii not as a mathematical trick but as a rotation operator. When wavefunctions are treated as oriented field objects, not just complex scalars, interference becomes a question of geometric compatibility. Superpositions and spin behavior can then be reinterpreted as topological effects in real space. This is where I think mainstream physics got lost: it started calculating without explaining.

ChatGPT didn’t invent these ideas. But it helped me phrase them, frame them, and press further on the points I had once hesitated to formalize. That’s what I mean when I say this wasn’t just a cleanup job. It was a real act of collaboration — a rare instance of AI not just paraphrasing or predicting, but amplifying and clarifying an unfinished line of human reasoning.

Both revised papers are now live on ResearchGate:

They mark, I think, a modest turning point. From theory and calculation toward something closer to explanation.

And yes — for those following the philosophical side of this project: we did also try to capture all of that in a four-panel comic involving Diogenes, a turtle, and Zeno’s paradox. But that, like all things cartooned by AI, is still a work in progress. 🙂

Post Scriptum (24 June 2025): When You Let the Machine Take the Pen

In the spirit of openness: there’s been one more development since publishing the two annexes above.

Feeling I had taken my analytical skills as far as I could — especially in tackling the geometry of nuclear structure — I decided to do something different. Instead of drafting yet another paper, I asked ChatGPT to take over. Not as a ghostwriter, but as a model builder. The prompt was simple: “Do better than me.”

The result is here:
👉 ChatGPT Trying to Do Better Than a Human Researcher

It’s dense, unapologetically geometric, and proposes a full zbw-based model for the neutron and deuteron — complete with energy constraints, field equations, and a call for numerical exploration. If the earlier annexes were dialogue, this one is delegation.

I don’t know if this is the end of the physics path for me. But if it is, I’m at peace with it. Not because the mystery is gone — but because I finally believe the mystery is tractable. And that’s enough for now.

Taking Stock: Zitterbewegung, Electron Models, and the Role of AI in Thinking Clearly

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularly the ring-current or Zitterbewegung (zbw) model of the electron. I’ve written many posts about it here — and also tried to help to promote the online “Zitter Institute”, which brings a very interesting group of both amateur and professional researchers together, as well as a rather impressive list of resources and publications which help to make sense of fundamental physics – especially on theories regarding the internal structure of the electron.

The goal — or at least my goal — was (and still is) to clarify what is real and what is not in the quantum-electrodynamic zoo of concepts. That is why I try to go beyond electron models only. I think the electron model is complete as for now: my most-read paper (on a physical interpretation of de Broglie’s matter-wave) settles the question not only for me but, I judge based on its many views, for many others as well. The paper shows how the magnetic moment of the electron, its wavefunction, and the notion of a quantized “packet of energy” can easily be grounded in Maxwell’s equations, special relativity, and geometry. They do not require speculative algebra, nor exotic ontologies.

In that light, I now feel the need to say something — brief, but honest — about where I currently stand in my research journey — which is not on the front burner right now but, yes, I am still thinking about it all. 🙂

On the term “Zitterbewegung” itself

Originally coined by Schrödinger and later mentioned by Dirac, “Zitterbewegung” translates as “trembling motion.” It was meant to capture the high-frequency internal oscillation predicted by Dirac’s wave equation.

But here lies a subtle issue: I no longer find the term entirely satisfying.

I don’t believe the motion is “trembling” in the sense of randomness or jitter. I believe it is geometrically structured, circular, and rooted in the relativistic dynamics of a massless point charge — leading to a quantized angular momentum and magnetic moment. In this view, there is nothing uncertain about it. The electron has an internal clock, not a random twitch.

So while I still value the historical connection, I now prefer to speak more plainly: an electromagnetic model of the electron, based on internal motion and structure, not spooky probabilities.

On tone and openness in scientific dialogue

Recent internal exchanges among fellow researchers have left me with mixed feelings. I remain grateful for the shared curiosity that drew us together, but I was disappointed by the tone taken toward certain outside critiques and tools.

I say this with some personal sensitivity: I still remember the skepticism I faced when I first shared my own interpretations. Papers were turned down not for technical reasons, but because I lacked the “right” institutional pedigree. I had degrees, but no physics PhD. I was an outsider.

Ridicule — especially when directed at dissent or at new voices — leaves a mark. So when I see similar reactions now, I feel compelled to say: we should be better than that.

If we believe in the integrity of our models, we should welcome critique — and rise to the occasion by clarifying, refining, or, if necessary, revising our views. Defensive posturing only weakens our case.

On the use of AI in physics

Some recent comments dismissed AI responses as irrelevant or superficial. I understand the concern. But I also believe this reaction misses the point.

I didn’t try all available platforms, but I did prompt ChatGPT, and — with the right framing — it offered a coherent and balanced answer to the question of the electron’s magnetic moment. Here’s a fragment:

“While the ‘definition’ of the intrinsic magnetic moment may be frame-invariant in the Standard Model, the observable manifestation is not. If the moment arises from internal circular motion (Zitterbewegung), then both radius and frequency are affected by boosts. Therefore, the magnetic moment, like momentum or energy, becomes frame-dependent in its effects.”

The jury is still out, of course. But AI — if guided by reason — might help us unravel what makes sense and what does not.

It is not a substitute for human thinking. But it can reflect it back to us — sometimes more clearly than we’d expect.

A final reflection

I’ll keep my older posts online, including those that reference the Zitter Institute. They reflected what I believed at the time, and I still stand by their substance.

But moving forward, I’ll continue my work independently — still fascinated by the electron, still curious about meaning and structure in quantum mechanics, but less interested in labels, echo chambers, or theoretical tribalism.

As always, I welcome criticism and dialogue. As one business management guru once said:

“None of us is as smart as all of us.” — Kenneth Blanchard

But truth and clarity come first.

— Jean Louis Van Belle

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:

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.
It speculates about how positive and negative charge may combine in a neutron, and then also about how a deuteron nucleus might look like.
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).
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.

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.

No reading of Feynman anymore…

I have not posted in a while, and that is because I find the format of a video much easier to express my thoughts. Have a look at my YouTube channel ! Also, for the more serious work, I must refer to my ResearchGate page. Have fun thinking things through ! 🙂

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…

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 = 2m_eff 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 (m_eff = 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 ! 🙂

Onwards !

It has been ages since I last wrote something here. Regular work took over. I did do an effort, though, to synchronize and reorganize some stuff. And I am no longer shy about it. My stats on ResearchGate and academia.edu show that I am no longer a ‘crackpot theorist’. This is what I wrote about it on my LinkedIn account:

QUOTE

With good work-life balance now, I picked up one of my hobbies again: research into quantum theories. As for now, I only did a much-needed synchronization of papers on academia.edu and ResearchGate. When logging on the former network (which I had not done for quite a while), I found many friendly messages on it. One of them was from a researcher on enzymes: “I have been studying about these particles for around four years. All of the basics. But wat are they exactly? This though inspired me… Thank u so much!” I smiled and relaxed when I read that, telling myself that all those sleepless nights I spent on this were not the waste of time and energy that most of my friends thought it would be. 🙂

Another one was even more inspiring. It was written by another ‘independent’ researcher. Nelda Evans. No further detail in her profile. From the stats, I could see that she had downloaded an older manuscript of mine (https://lnkd.in/ecRKJwxQ). This is what she wrote about it to me: “I spoke to Richard Feynman in person at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu California in 1967 where the first pulsed laser was invented when some of the students from the UCLA Physics Dept. went to hear him. Afterward I went to talk to him and said “Dr. Feynman, I’ve learned that some unknown scientists were dissatisfied with probability as a final description of Quantum Mechanics, namely Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohm,…” When I finished my list he immediately said “And Feynman”. We talked about it a little, and he told me “I like what you pick on.”
My guess is that he might have told you something similar.”

That message touched me deeply, because I do feel – from reading his rather famous Lectures on Physics somewhat ‘between the lines’ – that Richard Feynman effectively knew all but that he, somehow, was not allowed to clearly say what it was all about. I wrote a few things about that rather strange historical bias in the interpretation of ‘uncertainty’ and other ‘metaphysical’ concepts that infiltrated the science of quantum mechanics in my last paper: https://lnkd.in/ewZBcfke.

So… Well… I am not a crackpot scientist anymore ! 🙂 The bottom-line is to always follow your instinct when trying to think clearly about some problem or some issue. We should do what Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) told us to do: “Bring forward what is true. Write it so that it is clear. Defend it to your last breath.”

[…] Next ‘thing to do’, is to chat with ChatGPT about my rather straightforward theories. I want to see how ‘intelligent’ it is. I wonder where it will hit its limit in terms of ‘abstract thinking.’ The models I worked on combine advanced geometrical thinking (building ‘realistic’ particle models requires imagining ‘rotations within rotations’, among other things) and formal math (e.g. quaternion algebra). ChatGPT is excellent in both, I was told, but can it combine the two intelligently? 🙂

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On we go. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. 🙂 For those who want an easy ‘introduction’ to the work (at a K-12 level of understanding of mathematics), I wrote the first pages of what could become a very new K-12 level textbook on physics. Let us see. I do want to see some interest from a publisher first. 🙂