Demolishing The Quantum COPENHAGEN MISINTERPRETATION With Its Own Instruments:
The nature of reality fascinate true philosophers. Do we have to understand the Quantum to understand dreams? The naive will say no. But, well, in truth, probably. The brain is no analogue computer, it’s a QUANTUM computer. So, to understand dreams, one has to try to understand the quantum. However, to go deeper than the foundations of physics is, by definition, to suggest new physics.
I have said for many decades, that Quantum Waves are real… and obsolete physics is not. OK, just kidding, obsolete physics is all too real in the minds of physicists. Physicists are rarely amused about the foundations of physics: they know they don’t work, and prefer to ignore the subject. But the Quantum Computer will force them to confront it… To confront the waves:
The Universe Is Not Empty: It’s Full Of Stiff, Superluminal Quantum Waves
[The picture, made in 2013 by a fundamental physics institute in the Netherlands, was obtained by statistical sampling. Some call that technique a “Quantum Microscope”… Statistical sampling seems to be all there is to QTT, Quantum Trajectory Theory]
Quantum Waves are of course real objects. Proof? Well, experimental proofs are coming.
However, I will roll here a slick philosophical proof which I have seen, or even alluded to, nowhere. It’s disarmingly simple, of the order, in the way of baffling simplicity, of the celebrated, 26 centuries old, “this sentence is false” (the precise mathematical dressing of that brain twister, with a little help from Cantor, is known as the first Godel Incompleteness Theorem).
The first mention of the Copenhagen Interpretation was in Heisenberg’s 1930 book on Quantum Mechanics which, he wrote, “contributes somewhat to the diffusion of that ‘Kopenhagener Geist der Quantentheorie‘ [i.e., Copenhagen spirit of quantum theory] if I may so express myself, which has directed the entire development of modern atomic physics”.
So here I am fighting a “spirit” (“Geist”). (When confronted to the De Broglie-Bohm theory in the 1950s, the ex-Nazi Heisenberg called the “Copenhagen Geist” an “Interpretation“… a term he came to regret… Nowadays, people attached to sanity have to fight the “Many Worlds”/”Multiverse” Interpretation, a collective madness worse than smoking.)
Even the most closed minded physicist recognizes that (“elementary”) particles are (“somewhat”) real. In the Copenhagen Interpretation, the property of “wave” and that of “particle” are viewed as “dual” or “complementary” (one or the other).
However the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum (CIQ) then proceeds to contradict said duality. Indeed, if the wave-particle duality is correct (as the Copenhagenists claim), then obviously, if particles are real (something has got to be real!), then surely waves are real (because they are “dual” to each other).
However the Born Interpretation of the Quantum waves is that the Quantum Waves are PROBABILITY waves. But a probability wave is not real. Hence a blatant, fuming, red hot, grotesque, contradiction: particles are real, according to CIQ… in duality with Quantum Waves, according to CIQ… yet the waves are NOT real… according to CIQ!
This is an extremely elementary philosophical reasoning,. However, it seems to have escaped ALL the physicists who considered the subject. (Do parrots think? Yes, they do… all the same.)
Reciprocally, if one admits that the real world is really made, somehow, of real particles (as Einstein famously did), then the reasoning I just made suggests that the Quantum Waves are real.
Here is a completely independent demonstration of the latter: it turns out matter is mostly, all the time, launched in dynamical quantum processes. Actually most of the mass is generated by quick motions of quarks and gluons within hadrons, thanks to Poincaré’s relationship, Energy = Mass (“E = mcc”) . During these displacements, matter is under the form of Quantum Waves (or of dynamical quantum fields, as some will want to say, to sound real cool). An example is electronic orbitals in atoms: they have substance… because they are delocalized waves. Thus, matter is clearly made, 99.999% of the time, of delocalized quantum waves.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: Foundations Quantum Physics, Matter Waves, Quantum Waves
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
May 19, 2016 at 2:44 am |
Dear Patrice, You do not have to convince me thatcher his at least some reality to quantal matter waves. Of course psi, the wave function, is mainly complex, so we have to be careful what we mean by “real”. In my Guidance Wave interpretation, the wave actually becomes real at the antinodes (thanks to Euler).
LikeLike
May 19, 2016 at 2:45 am |
Oops – can’t edit. “thatcher his” is this wretched computer deciding to improve what wa presumably a typo in “that there is”
LikeLiked by 1 person
May 19, 2016 at 2:04 pm |
Yes, I know, spell checkers are really going crazy these days. Sometimes my texts are modified, by the spell checker, well after final edit. There are plenty of example of “from” becoming “form”, or “remember” becoming “remain”…
LikeLike
May 19, 2016 at 2:09 pm |
Thanks for the feedback, Ian. “Complex” is often viewed as scary, but it’s not: after all, a flying “photon”, with its polarization is a perfect depiction of what a “complex number” is, namely polarization/rotation integrated.
Another objection has been that the psi (maybe it’s psy, like in mind…)function is in so-called “configuration” space. But actually, it’s the same argument which allows me to claim the dimension of the brain is at least 50…
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 1:04 am |
What’s your guidance wave interpretation? Louis De Broglie has one, Bohm has one, Patrice has one…
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 2:34 am |
Like de Broglie and Bohm, I assume there is a physical entity that behaves like a wave and mathematically it is of the form Ψ = Aexp(2πiS/h) – that is essentially standard, with S the action. My first difference is that when S/h is integral, from Euler the phase is no longer complex, so at the antinodes, momentarily the wave becomes real. Apart from the fact that nobody seems to take any notice of Euler’s relationship, I attach physical significance to the point of reality. The second difference is I assume the wave is the cause of diffraction in the 2-slit experiment. (For some reason i cannot understand, nobody else seems to do this either.) To do that, the wave has to travel at the expectation velocity of the particle otherwise they are not there at the same time. The phase velocity is E/p, (from de Broglie and Einstein wave equations) which means E is twice the kinetic energy. Like every other wave, the wave therefore transmits energy and the square of the amplitude is proportional to the energy. If you accept that, then why the electron does not radiate energy in a stationary state follows, as does the Uncertainty principle and the Exclusion principle, and why electrons pair. I am a chemist and the reason i came up with this is that simple chemical bonds properties such and binding energy and bond long are calculable quite well without the use of a computer, and to a first approximation, that of the H2 molecule is simple mental arithmetic – 1/3 the Rydberg energy of hydrogen. More details in my ebook.
LikeLike
May 21, 2016 at 12:46 am |
Dear ian, thanks for the answer. Very interesting. However, completely confused here. If one moves a screen on which an interference pattern shows up, there is still an interference. A real interference, so I don’t understand that node thing-Euler law
LikeLike
May 24, 2016 at 4:18 am
I had the same objection. Moreover, with due respect for Descartes semantics, I view the “imaginary” numbers as as natural as the real numbers (which of course don’t make sense as I explained in the “Greatest Number”…)
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 1:00 am |
Could you talk about that May 2016 experiment you linked to?
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 2:35 am |
Are you asking me or Patrice? If me, more details please.
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 4:46 am |
I think Gmax is referring to:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160512142912.htm
I linked to it, it was just published, and I intent to write about it because it’s the third argument I was going to use about the reality of the Quantum Waves.
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 7:32 am |
Like ianmillerblog wrote, the question is what one means by ‘real’. Most physicists adopt a practical point of view, roughly summarized as ” since this works-and it does, ‘show me another theory that gives agreement to 1 part in a billion’-, there must be an element of reality in this.”. What this reality is, is a completely different problem though and, like Feynman said “nobody really understands quantum mechanics”. For most puproses (that is basically unless one does single particle work), one can (strictly speaking wrongly) view this as an extremely successful statistical theory (and statistical theories are inherently very reliable because they are fairly insensitive to one freak accident). The complex-valuedness of wavefunctions is in my opinion not an issue for questioning the reality or not of the “wave” (IMHO it’s just a convenient mathematical tool), but the interpretation as a probability amplitude is. And it is necessary to explain things like diffraction. The experiment described basically demonstrates entanglement and will probably have to see how to overcome decoherence, as more than emitter and photon get entangled (it’s the detecting device as well), but this can hopefully be minimized.
LikeLike
May 20, 2016 at 2:53 pm |
Nothing stands under Quantum Physics, so far, making it the ultimate depiction of reality.
Yet, IMHO, the shortcoming of Quantum Mechanics may be in our face: DARK MATTER. (It’s a direct consequence of my interpretation…)
What struck me before I wrote that piece was the lack of duality of the Copenhagen Interpretation. I have known it for decades, of course, but I never reflected that it was an obvious contradiction: Copenhagists claim duality, but then the Born interpretation, that the quantum wave is probabilistic, is a complete contradiction.
The other fact is that mass is obtained from dynamical, and dynamical means spread out, thus wave.
LikeLike
June 18, 2017 at 5:13 pm |
[…] the same exact objection has been made when the likes of yours truly have claimed that “Quantum Waves Are Real“: some physicists haughtily sneered back that Quantum Waves couldn’t possibly be real, […]
LikeLike