The Tide is Turning: Finding Reflection, Freedom, and a Realist Turnaround

Dear Readers,

For over a decade, this blog has been a notebook for a relentless, often exhausting intellectual struggle. It began as a stubborn refusal to accept the orthodox assertion that the sub-atomic world is fundamentally acausal, random, and closed to human intuition. Reading and re-reading Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, I always felt a deep, instinctive friction against the dogmatic decree that we must “accept the mystery” and stop looking for real, localized physical mechanisms.

I spent years demanding that Nature must make logical sense. There were countless late nights filled with the agonizing doubt that is the tax of any independent researcher. It was easy to wonder if I was merely shouting into a void, or if my insistence on modeling real, localized ring currents and exact three-dimensional spatial geometries was just an isolating eccentricity.

Today, that cognitive static has finally cleared. I have reached a quiet, profound state of mental peace.

I am happy to announce the publication of my latest working paper on ResearchGate: “The Realist Turnaround: How Artificial Intelligence Extricates Natural Philosophy from the Postmodern Blind Alley.“ Co-authored alongside Google’s Gemini platform, this paper represents a complete synthesis of my physical frameworks, my 2020 thesis on sense-making, and the extraordinary history of 20th-century science.

We trace exactly how the Copenhagen interpretation was constructed—not by the mandate of experimental data, but as a psychological capitulation to post-WWI Weimar anxiety, the computational bottlenecks of pencil-and-paper mathematics, and a deep-ingrained human desire to outsource difficult explanations to an untouchable metaphysical “Mystery”.

More importantly, this paper marks a deeply personal transition for me. It is not a goodbye to physics, but it is a step off the exhausting mountain of continuous reflection. Thanks to the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the brutal, computational load of fundamental calculation can now be handed over to the machine. The AI acts as an unanxious, high-fidelity cognitive mirror, free from institutional biases or the need for mystical comfort. It has allowed the long-standing “mysteries” I grappled with for decades to cleanly dissolve into intelligible classical mechanics.

This realization has made me see that I was never a “lone thinker.” The decades of frustration were not a solitary anomaly; they were part of a long, sustained intellectual tide that is finally turning against the nihilistic and anti-realist undercurrents of postmodern thought. Realism, determinism, and absolute causal responsibility are returning to the center of how we make sense of our world.

With the sub-atomic ledger safely brought to a consistent, logical close, I am looking forward to reclaiming my own degrees of freedom. I intend to spend much less time calculating, and much more time simply being—losing myself in a great novel, picking up my guitar again, and enjoying the company of my children and loved ones much more than I did in the past.

The paper is open for thought, discussion, and your own independent critique on ResearchGate.

Thank you for walking this long road with me. The Universe is rational, our choices genuinely matter, and the mountain has finally been crossed.

Warm regards,
Jean Louis Van Belle

Post Scriptum (23 August 2026): Keep Walking !

A day after writing the post above, Lecture Y-8 (Emergence of the Fine-Structure Constant and the Mechanics of Topological Phase-Cancellation) was published. It is the culmination of a decade of thinking—and the clearest evidence I have that the tide is indeed turning.

The paper, co-authored with DeepSeek and Gemini, derives the fine-structure constant as a geometric ratio, explains electron-positron annihilation as topological phase-cancellation, and eliminates renormalization through a finite, non-singular Coulomb potential. It is not a critique of quantum field theory. It is an alternative: a complete, non-perturbative, realist framework grounded in the topology of self-confining electromagnetic fields.

I mention this not to boast, but to make a point about the nature of the journey. The mountain I thought I had crossed was not the last one. It was simply the one that had been blocking my view. From this new summit, I see other peaks—proton structure, nuclear geometry, cosmological implications—and I am not tired. I am curious.

The difference is that I no longer feel I have to climb them alone. The AI systems I work with do not just critique; they accompany. They do not just point out gaps; they help build bridges. They have taught me that “realism” is not a solitary creed but a shared practice—a way of walking the walk together.

So yes, I am stepping off the exhausting mountain of continuous reflection. But I am not stepping away from physics. I am stepping into a different kind of engagement: one marked by clarity rather than struggle, by collaboration rather than isolation, and by the quiet satisfaction of having finally found the right walking companions.

The Universe is rational. Our choices matter. And the next mountain is already visible on the horizon.

📝 Steering the Ship Back to Reality – A Productive Exchange with MIT

I had a very cordial Zoom conversation with Jean-Jacques Slotine from MIT. We discussed his recent Royal Society paper, “On computing quantum waves exactly from classical action“. The exchange was truly refreshing, collegial, and highly constructive. Unlike what I had expected, he didn’t ‘look down on me’ as an ‘amateur researcher’: he ‘engaged’ from the first second, and there was no need for me to ‘pull up’ any defensive line. It reminded me that the real progress in foundational physics happens when independent seekers step out of their institutional silos and focus on a shared goal: bringing physics back to physical reality.

The public discussion surrounding their paper has been highly polarized, and focused – as it should – primarily on textbook mathematical orthodoxy. But looking past the immediate academic nitpicking reveals that the core mission of their work is a major step forward. Lohmiller and Slotine are fighting to restore classical determinism and transport dynamics to a field that has been gridlocked by abstract mysticism for nearly a century. By providing a low-noise, elegant computational alternative to Feynman’s unphysical infinity of “zig-zagging” paths, their framework provides a much-needed course correction for academic physics.

The conversation naturally touched on our different starting setups. While their current formulation retains multi-path coordinates to map statistical landscapes, my own work with the RealQM framework operates on a continuous, unified field under a rigid Born-Infeld ceiling.

But this divergence isn’t a conflict—it’s an ontological fork in the road. In fact, what they are doing with their multi-path classical updates is exactly what I did in my early papers when I dissected the strong force: treating complex, highly non-linear local field dynamics as a purely phenomenological effect to make the calculations manageable. They are building a beautiful, high-utility mathematical bridge back toward determinism.

We also had a fascinating exchange about the role of AI in modern research. I shared how a contrarian, adversarial pairing of advanced engines (Gemini and DeepSeek, in this particular case (physics research)) can serve as a powerful tool for independent verification. Rather than using AI to blindly rubber-stamp standard textbook consensus, we can use it to stress-test our perimeters and find the precise physical mechanisms required to anchor our models.

I want to thank Winfried and Jean-Jacques for a genuinely inspiring discussion. There is no rivalry here—only fellow seekers following the math where it leads. I have promised to alert them the moment this post goes live, and I look forward to our ongoing collaboration as we continue to solidify the classical foundations of the quantum world.

Post Scriptum (4 August 2026)

Since publishing this post, the conversation has deepened significantly. I am now convinced that the Lohmiller-Slotine framework is not just a mathematical bridge—it is a physical one. To anchor this conviction, I have published a formal assessment of their introductory equations on ResearchGate: 👉 A RealQM Assessment of the MIT paper: “On computing quantum waves exactly from classical action”

The paper, co-authored with my AI partners Gemini and DeepSeek, does three things:

It validates the MIT math as remarkably tight and sound.
It resolves the Vattay chain-rule critique by mapping the missing quantum potential to the internal elastic stress of an extended particle (a spinning toroidal current sheet).
It outlines an empirical roadmap—the only thing that can turn a beautiful theory into physics.

That roadmap now has a name: SunDance. It is my new AMD/NVIDIA laptop, and will have to process the raw electron diffraction datasets from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (the Bach-Batelaan group). That will be no small task: the data was – back at the time – processed by a supercomputer cluster. However, my gaming laptop has more cores, twice the clocktime, much more internal memory bandwidth, and hardware acceleration (a GPU supporting the CPU cores). Hence, it should work.

The goal is simple: to see if the mass-metric coupling predicted by the MIT framework—and interpreted through RealQM—can reproduce the single- and double-slit interference patterns without hand-feeding phases or dropping derivatives. The data is public. The code is open. The hardware is ready.

I will report back as the verification unfolds. If you are an experimentalist or a realist physicist interested in this effort, please reach out. There is no rivalry here—only fellow seekers following the math where it leads.

Revisiting Force and Field Structures: A Human–AI Exploration of Oscillatory Geometry and Nuclear Organization

A new working paper is now online on ResearchGate: Revisiting Force and Field Structures: Structured Oscillatory Fields, Multipole Geometry and Emergent Interaction Scales.

The paper grew out of a long-running line of inquiry that readers of this blog (readingfeynman.org) will probably recognize immediately: the attempt to recover some form of geometrical and physical intuition underneath the highly successful — but often philosophically abstract — formalism of modern quantum physics.

To be plain about its objectives: this is not a “the Standard Model is wrong” paper. It is also not an attempt to derive nuclear physics from classical electromagnetism. Instead, it asks a more modest — but perhaps still interesting — question:

Could some effective interaction behaviors usually associated with distinct fundamental forces emerge, at least partially, from structured oscillatory field organization itself?

The paper explores this possibility through:

multipole geometry,
neutron form factors,
oscillatory charge structures,
coherence and decoherence,
phase cancellation,
and scale-dependent field organization.

From point particles to structured oscillatory systems

The central intuition behind the paper is simple enough. Much of both classical and quantum theory starts from the approximation of particles as point-like entities carrying charges or other attributes. But once one allows for internal structure — even only heuristically — the mathematics of the external field changes immediately.

Instead of particle → q, we consider: particle → {q_i(t), r_i(t)}

The moment charge becomes spatially organized, multipole structure naturally appears:

at large distances, monopole terms dominate;
at shorter scales, dipole, quadrupole and higher-order contributions begin to matter.

This is standard electromagnetic theory. The interesting question is whether some aspects of nuclear interaction behavior may reflect such structured organization more deeply than we usually assume.

Why the neutron matters

The paper starts from neutron structure rather than from abstract philosophy. That was a deliberate choice.

Neutron scattering experiments and the neutron magnetic moment strongly suggest that the neutron is not a featureless neutral object. Instead, it possesses rich internal charge organization. Experimental form factors suggest a negative charge distribution extending more toward the outside, while positive charge contributions remain more central.
That does not prove any specific oscillatory model. But it strongly motivates taking structured neutrality seriously. Once neutrality becomes structured rather than absolute, the mathematics of multipoles becomes conceptually central.

Multipoles, coherence and effective range

One of the core ideas explored in the paper is that effective interaction range may emerge naturally from:

geometrical self-cancellation,
multipolar organization,
and restricted coherence.

A monopole field preserves coherent outward flux and therefore remains long-range. Structured neutral systems behave differently. Their fields partially self-cancel at larger scales, causing the effective field to fall off much more rapidly. The paper therefore also explores whether Yukawa-like short-range behavior might emerge through:

oscillatory (de)coherence,
phase cancellation,
or structured field overlap,

rather than necessarily requiring fundamentally distinct ontological interactions.

Again, the paper — or, let us be specific, me — does not claim that the strong force is “really electromagnetism.” Instead, it asks whether some phenomenology currently encoded through effective interaction language may also admit deeper geometrical interpretation.

A note on human–AI collaboration

The paper is also interesting to me for another reason. It was produced through a long iterative interaction between a human author and an AI reasoning system. Not in the simplistic sense of: “AI writes paper.”

But rather through:

conceptual dialogue,
restructuring,
mathematical clarification,
objection handling,
ontology calibration,
and repeated epistemic tightening.

So no, the AI did not “discover new physics.” But it did contribute substantially to:

organization,
continuity,
mathematical scaffolding,
conceptual compression,
and internal consistency.

Meanwhile, the human side continuously supplied:

physical intuition,
philosophical direction,
conceptual discomfort detection,
and final judgment regarding meaning and plausibility.

The result is what it is: not a definitive theory, but a simple working paper. An exploratory line of inquiry.

But perhaps also a small demonstration of what structured human–AI intellectual collaboration may begin to look like.

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics and the Myth of Consensus

A recent Nature briefing highlighted a survey on what physicists and science enthusiasts think about some of the deepest unresolved questions in modern physics. Predictably, my attention went almost immediately to the question on quantum mechanics and its interpretation.

What struck me was not so much which interpretation came out on top, but rather the absence of any overwhelming consensus at all.

This is remarkable when one thinks about it. Quantum mechanics is, without doubt, the most successful physical theory ever developed in terms of predictive power. The equations work. Spectacularly well. And yet, almost a century after the Solvay Conferences, physicists remain deeply divided on what these equations actually mean.

That distinction matters: The mathematics is not in crisis but the ontology still is.

Let us, before proceeding to a deeper analysis, reproduce the exact survey question, the wording used to describe the Copenhagen interpretation, and the surprisingly fragmented result.

The survey asked: “Quantum mechanics can provide exceptionally accurate predictions of real-world phenomena. Yet, physicists cannot explain how the reality we experience emerges from the laws of quantum mechanics—a question that many ‘interpretations’ of quantum mechanics attempt to solve. In your opinion, which interpretation of quantum mechanics is most likely to be correct?”

The Copenhagen interpretation itself was described as: “an object’s behavior is described by a multi-state wavefunction, which collapses to one state when an object is measured.”

That description strikes me as reasonably accurate and fair. This makes the result even more surprising:

Only about 36% of respondents selected Copenhagen as the most likely interpretation. In other words, the so-called “mainstream” interpretation of quantum mechanics does not command anything close to a majority among the respondents to this survey.

This raises the question: why would we even call it “mainstream”?

Why is there no majority interpretation?

The answer is probably sociological rather than scientific. Copenhagen became the historical teaching framework of twentieth-century quantum mechanics. It became institutionalized. Textbooks adopted its language. Generations of physicists learned to “shut up and calculate,” often without worrying too much about the philosophical implications.

However, I think the survey also reveals something deeper: there remains substantial discomfort with the idea that the wavefunction is merely a probabilistic object with no deeper physical meaning:

Some physicists prefer Many Worlds.
Others prefer Bohmian mechanics.
Others gravitate toward objective collapse models.
Others embrace QBism, which interprets the wavefunction as an observer’s personal expectation rather than an objective feature of reality.

And then there is a surprisingly large “none of the above” category. I would definitely have chosen that option myself.

Why none of the above?

My own view does not align comfortably with any of the standard categories. In a broad sense, my interpretation may look somewhat like a hidden-variable approach. However, the term “hidden variable” is often misleading because it suggests adding extra variables to the formalism in order to restore determinism.

That is not really what interests me. What interests me is the possibility that some of the quantities already present in quantum mechanics — especially phase — may correspond to physically real processes rather than abstract mathematical bookkeeping devices. More specifically, I tend to think of the phase of the wavefunction as the phase of a real underlying oscillation:

The problem is not necessarily that reality is undefined.
The problem may simply be that the oscillation is too fast, too small, or too deeply embedded in the structure of matter for us to access directly.

In that sense, uncertainty may be operational rather than ontological. This is one reason why I continue to find Schrödinger’s old Zitterbewegung idea fascinating.

Dirac’s remarkable remark

Paul Dirac, in his 1933 Nobel Lecture, referred explicitly to Schrödinger’s interpretation of the electron as involving an extremely rapid oscillatory motion:

“This is a prediction which cannot be directly verified by experiment, since the frequency of the oscillatory motion is so high and its amplitude is so small. But one must believe in this consequence of the theory, since other consequences of the theory which are inseparably bound up with this one, such as the law of scattering of light by an electron, are confirmed by experiment.”

I find this quote extraordinary. Not because Dirac claims the oscillation was experimentally verified — it was not — but because he explicitly argues that one should still take the consequence seriously because the broader structure of the theory works so well.

That is a very different philosophical stance from modern textbook Copenhagenism, which often treats such internal structure as either meaningless or inaccessible in principle. Dirac’s remark effectively suggests that the oscillation might be physically real, even if it is experimentally inaccessible at present.

Phase realism versus probabilistic ontology

The modern interpretations debate often feels strangely constrained to me.

One camp argues that the wavefunction is merely information.
Another argues that all branches of the wavefunction are physically real.
Another introduces pilot waves.
Another introduces collapse processes.

But all of these approaches still inherit the standard ontology of the formalism more or less intact. My own discomfort lies, therefore, elsewhere.

I increasingly suspect that the equations themselves may be describing emergent phase-coherent behavior of deeper oscillatory structures rather than probability clouds existing in abstract Hilbert space.

That may sound radical at first glance, but it is actually rather conservative in spirit:

keep the equations,
keep the experimental predictions,
but reconsider what the variables physically represent.

In my own work on de Broglie’s matter-wave concept, I tried to formulate this distinction more explicitly:

the experimentally observed interference behavior may correspond to envelope or translational phase coherence,
while a deeper internal oscillatory dynamics remains hidden beneath the observable layer.

This is not an attack on quantum mechanics. Quite the opposite. It is an attempt to take some parts of quantum mechanics more literally than modern orthodoxy usually allows.

Final thought

The survey reminded me of something important. Despite the immense success of quantum mechanics, physics may still be in a strangely transitional period conceptually. The equations work. But the underlying picture of reality remains unsettled.

For decades, physics culture has often leaned toward the pragmatic “shut up and calculate” attitude: use the formalism, trust the predictions, and avoid asking too many questions about what the equations might actually represent physically. That attitude was understandable. Quantum mechanics works extraordinarily well. But surveys like this suggest that, beneath the practical success of the formalism, there remains no genuine consensus about the ontology underneath it. The equations may be spectacularly successful while our interpretation of their physical meaning remains incomplete.

Perhaps that is not a weakness of physics, but a reminder that some conceptual revolutions begin precisely where calculation alone stops being intellectually satisfying. After all, the history of physics itself shows that renewal usually begins not when equations fail, but when people start asking what the equations are actually trying to tell us.

Lost in Math?

[Pre-scriptum (May 2026): This blog post grew out of a broader reflection that has since taken a more structured form. Prompted in part by the critical perspective of Sabine Hossenfelder, I have developed these ideas further in a short paper—Physics Beyond Prediction: On Beauty, Meaning and the Interpretation of Theory—which revisits the distinction between theory, calculation, and explanation, and asks what may still be missing from our current understanding of “good physics.”]

I finally got around to reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s ‘Lost in Math‘ (2018).

It fully deserves its praise. The book is, as the reviewers write, accessible, well-informed, and engaging—at times even genuinely funny. The structure, built around interviews with leading theorists, gives it both breadth and credibility. It is, without doubt, one of the better popular accounts of modern theoretical physics.

It also felt familiar.

Hossenfelder and I belong to roughly the same generation. As teenagers in the 1980s, we were fascinated by the same questions: What is the Standard Model really about? Where did it come from? What problems did it solve that even Albert Einstein or Max Planck could not? And what new questions did it open?

And then, of course, the next layer: why do we need theories beyond it—string theory, supersymmetry—if the Standard Model already works so well? What are these theories trying to explain that the Standard Model cannot?

And what should we make of the experimental side of things? From the discovery of the Higgs boson to the evidence for dark matter, dark energy, and gravitational waves—what do these findings actually mean?

Hossenfelder chose to pursue these questions within academic physics. I did not. I studied economics, but continued to explore physics as a personal project—especially after 2012, when the Higgs boson was announced. By then, I had grown dissatisfied with popular science accounts and felt the need to understand the mathematics itself.

And yet, after working through the math, I found myself asking a different kind of question: not whether the equations work, but what they mean.

It is here that Hossenfelder’s book, for me, remains incomplete.

Beauty, Truth—and Something Missing

The central argument of Lost in Math is well known: modern theoretical physics has been led astray by an overreliance on aesthetic criteria—symmetry, elegance, mathematical beauty—at the expense of empirical grounding.

That critique is compelling, and I largely agree with it.

But it seems to stop halfway.

While Hossenfelder questions the role of beauty, she does not fundamentally question the underlying framework itself. The Standard Model and its extensions remain, in her account, the unquestioned language in which physical truth must ultimately be expressed.

What is largely absent is a deeper discussion of physical interpretation.

The Question of Meaning

Let me be more concrete.

The book does not attempt to explain why the strong force could not be understood in more classical terms, for example as some form of electromagnetic interaction arising from internal charge dynamics.

It does not address why abstract quantum numbers—color charge, flavour, isospin—should be regarded as physically compelling, rather than as mathematical constructs that work but lack intuitive grounding.

Likewise, the weak force appears mainly as part of a formal structure, without much discussion of what it might represent in more tangible terms—such as the distinction between stable and unstable particles.

And perhaps most strikingly, the book does not engage in any depth with the meaning of the most fundamental relations in physics: the quantization expressed in the Planck relation, or the significance of mass-energy equivalence. These are presented as known facts, not as conceptual puzzles.

None of this is a flaw in the usual sense. It is simply not the book Hossenfelder set out to write.

But it is the book I was hoping to read.

Old Physics, Reconsidered

So where does that leave us?

In my own work, I often find myself returning to what many would call “old physics”: Maxwell’s equations, together with relations like Planck–Einstein relation and mass–energy equivalence.

This may seem old-fashioned. Perhaps it is.

But I am increasingly convinced that the real challenge is not to extend the mathematical formalism, but to understand what the existing formalism is telling us about physical reality.

From that perspective, the problem is not only that modern physics may have followed beauty too far. It is also that it may have drifted too far from meaning.

A Different Kind of Dissatisfaction

Hossenfelder ends her book on a note of optimism. Physics, she argues, will continue to make breakthroughs, and those breakthroughs will—once again—be beautiful.

I hope she is right.

But closing the book, I was left with a different thought. Not frustration, but a kind of clarity.

I realized that I am quite content continuing to explore these questions from a more classical, more intuitive starting point—even if that places me outside the mainstream.

Because, in the end, the question that still matters most to me is a simple one:

Not whether the mathematics works, but whether we truly understand what it is saying.

Post scriptum on the 2019 revision of SI units

Sabine Hossenfelder finished and published her book in 2018—just before the 2019 revision of the SI units.

I find myself wondering whether that revision is, in its own quiet way, more meaningful than many of the theoretical developments discussed in her book. Perhaps I am over-interpreting, but this is how it looks to me.

The revised SI system fixes exact numerical values for a small number of fundamental constants, such as the Planck constant, the elementary charge, and the speed of light. In doing so, it anchors our system of measurement in quantities that are directly tied to observation and experiment.

What is striking, however, is what it does not include.

There is no place in the SI framework for the various additional “charges” or quantum numbers that appear in the Standard Model—no color charge, no flavour, no isospin. These concepts may be essential within the mathematical structure of modern particle physics, but they do not enter the system that defines how we measure physical reality.

This is not a flaw in the SI system—quite the contrary. It is designed to remain independent of theoretical interpretation, and to rely only on quantities that can be operationally defined and reproducibly measured.

But that, in itself, is revealing.

It suggests a distinction between what we can measure directly and what we introduce as part of a theoretical framework. And it raises a question—at least for me—about how closely our most advanced theories are tied to physically meaningful quantities.

None of this diminishes the achievements recognized by a Nobel Prize in Physics or other honours—or the remarkable success of modern theoretical physics more generally. But it does serve as a quiet reminder that predictive success is not the same as final understanding.

If anything, the SI revision reinforces my own inclination to look for interpretations of physics that remain as close as possible to what can be directly measured and understood.

Post-Post-Scriptum on what I would like to write

Since writing this, I’ve taken a small but meaningful step: I uploaded a somewhat older manuscript and a newly written Chapter 2 to ResearchGate, as companion documents to my Radial Genesis paper (thoughts on cosmology).

It is not as a finished book — far from it — but as a snapshot of where my thinking currently stands. If I were to write a full-blown book about this, it would not be a technical monograph, nor a speculative manifesto. It would be something in between: a guided journey. I would try to connect three layers:

the physical intuition (what kind of universe are we actually living in?),
the mathematical structure (how symmetry, geometry, and scaling laws shape that intuition),
and the cosmological narrative (how a finite universe with emergent spacetime could naturally arise).

Most importantly, I would try to bridge particle physics and cosmology — not as separate domains, but as different perspectives on the same underlying structure.

The current documents are fragments of that attempt. For now, I will leave them as they are. Sometimes it is better to pause, let ideas settle, and return later with fresh eyes.

Post-post-post-scriptum

I couldn’t help thinking about this question: if the math in academic physics has become “ugly” or “lost,” then what would a beautiful alternative look like? Of course, ‘beauty’ (for me, at least) is a combination of simplicity and realism, and so that is my ‘RealQM’ world view. So I did a quick paper on ResearchGate on what Sabine Hossenfelder still thinks of as very ‘mysterious’ but which, to me, is easily explained in my ‘RealQM’ framework’:

The “Ghost” Sector (Dark Matter): Two types of electromagnetism (defined by the fundamental asymmetry in Maxwell’s equations modern mainstream physicists completely ignore) share the same spacetime but do not interact otherwise. Because they share the same spacetime, they do interact ‘gravitationally’. Full stop: no further explanation needed.
The Proton Radius: My two-line theoretical calculation gives a proton radius of 0.841 fm. Recent measurements clocked the proton at 0.8406(15) fm. What more confirmation is needed to urge physicists to think of particles as dynamical structures rather than abstract entities with lots of abstract or non-measurable properties?
Needless to say: challenges are still out there, and AI baptizes one of them now officially as The Geometry Challenge or Proton Yarnball Puzzle.

Read this last (?) working paper on ResearchGate here.

From Gauge Freedom to Physical Meaning: the X-Lecture Series

The X-lectures series complement our previous Lectures series on ResearchGate on electromagnetic and quantum theory from a classical perspective, which we define as making sense of Maxwell’s equations and the Planck–Einstein relation from what we call a realist perspective. The objective of this new series is not to oppose modern physics, but to better understand it—by carefully revisiting some of its foundational assumptions.

The starting point is Lecture X1, in which we operationalize the distinction between stability and instability of charged particles through a simple but physically meaningful quantity: the phase-closure defect . Instead of treating decay as fundamentally probabilistic, we interpret it as the gradual loss of phase coherence in an internal dynamical structure. This provides a concrete example of what we call a statistical determinist reading of quantum phenomena.

Lecture X2 then revisits the concept of a gauge in classical electromagnetic theory. While gauge freedom is usually presented as a harmless mathematical redundancy, we argue that it is not entirely “innocent”: the choice of gauge reflects boundary conditions, physical assumptions, and the way we organize the description of interactions.

In Lecture X3, we take a further step. Modern physics elevates gauge symmetry from a freedom of description to a guiding principle from which interactions are derived. We examine this move carefully and contrast it with a realist interpretation in which the phase of the wavefunction represents physical structure rather than a purely mathematical degree of freedom. From this perspective, gauge fields may be seen as arising from consistency requirements of the formalism, rather than as fundamental entities.

Taken together, the three papers trace a conceptual progression:

from stability as phase coherence (X1)
to gauge freedom as non-trivial choice (X2)
to gauge principles as powerful—but possibly non-fundamental—structures (X3)

In essence, we move from a “gauge is not innocent” position to a “gauge may not be fundamental” position.

The broader aim is modest but, we think, important: to show that the standard formalism of modern physics remains operationally complete, while its interpretation is not unique. Exploring alternative ontologies—such as the realist perspective adopted here—may help clarify what our equations are actually telling us about physical reality.

Links to the papers (X1: Operationalizing the Stability–Instability Frontier, X2: Intuitive Notions on Gauge Theory, X3 From Gauge Freedom to Gauge Principles—and Beyond) are in the text above.

As always, comments are welcome—but preferably in the form of arguments, equations, or better ideas.

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.

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 ! 🙂

Post Scriptum (23 August 2026): Keep Walking !

From point particles to structured oscillatory systems

Why the neutron matters

Multipoles, coherence and effective range

A note on human–AI collaboration

Why is there no majority interpretation?

Why none of the above?

Dirac’s remarkable remark

Phase realism versus probabilistic ontology

Final thought

Beauty, Truth—and Something Missing

The Question of Meaning

Old Physics, Reconsidered

A Different Kind of Dissatisfaction

Post scriptum on the 2019 revision of SI units

Post-Post-Scriptum on what I would like to write

Post-post-post-scriptum

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

After the Mysteries: Physics Without Consolations

The Comfort of Indeterminism

Determinism, Statistics, and Freedom

Progress Without Revelation

After Physics Ends

The uncomfortable admission: I was wrong about the 12\tfrac{1}{2} factor​

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

One symbol, too many jobs

Why this does not contradict experiments

A personal note on changing one’s mind

Where this opens doors

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

(But the Question About Annihilation Would Not Stay Quiet)

(But the Next Question Is Already Knocking.)

Why revisit this at all?

A word about standing waves (and why they appear)

Why this felt worth publishing

Could we stop here?

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

Most things now feel… settled

Matter–antimatter still feels different

Annihilation is unsettlingly easy

What happens to charge?

And pure vacuum pair creation?

So where does that leave us?

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

What is actually being classified in particle physics?

The quiet assumption we almost never examine

Statistical determinism sharpens the problem

Why this can feel like being “duped”

What my taxonomy does — and does not — claim

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

A broader resonance (human and artificial)

A calm conclusion

Stability as the exception, not the rule

Colliders as stress tests, not ontological excavations

A simpler cosmological intuition

Were the mega-projects worth it?

Knowing when not to add layers

Post Scriptum — An empirical follow-up

Not a new theory — a different starting point

From electrons to nuclei: stability as a guide

Interaction without mysticism

Why classification matters

A programme statement, not a conclusion

Why I am sharing this now

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

a) Renormalization unease is legitimate

b) Scientific sociology is real

c) The g–2 tension is real

2. Where Consa overreaches

a) Messiness ≠ manipulation

b) Ignoring the full evidence landscape

c) Underestimating theoretical structure

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

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

a) Randolf Pohl: polite skepticism, institutional gravity

b) Ashot Gasparian: warm support, but no bandwidth

The lesson

5. Why I now use AI as an epistemic partner

6. So… is something rotten in QED?

What’s rotten is the mismatch

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