FREE WILL SHOWS QUANTUM PHYSICS IS INCOMPLETE

Present Day Quantum Physics Is Entangled With Photon Awareness, While Contradicting Free Will, In A Most Peculiar Way…

Abstract: The Axiomatics of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum is written as if photons were aware of slits-at-a-distance… And as if photons acted accordingly (as if photons cared about slits!)… But the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum provides NO mechanism for photons to take care of slits. This is absurd in two ways. It’s as if an anthropomorphic Mr. Photon was supposed to be telepathetic. Another problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (“CIQ”) is that CIQ Quantum Physics, being deterministic, denies Free Will.

Conclusion: Quantum Theory is not the final story. Guiding Wave theories with delayed causality, such as SQPR, are necessary to reduce the nonsense.

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We act, we decide, we initiate actions. Can we insert this faculty for action of our own Free Will, this human agency, into the general picture of nature (“physics”) that we presently have? No! Because physics as we know it is deterministic… And we are not! (Quantum Physics, contrarily to its repute, is deterministic… as long as its nonlocal effects are not considered…) 

Thus the humanity-as-an-independent-agent question leads to the depths of the human mind and its relationship with physical reality, throwing up profound connections to the mysteries of entropy (disorder augments… something biology violates) and the arrow of time (time flowing one way… although fundamental physics flow both ways, contradicting even entropy as fundamental). Even reality gets questioned (what is it?) and consciousness (what could it be?) Surprising answers are readily discernible. 

“Quantum fields don’t have any agency. Atoms don’t, do bacteria?” asks physicist Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology. “I don’t know, but human beings do. Somewhere along that continuum it sneaked in.”

Quantum Determinism a la Copenhagen Means We Have No Freedom Of Choice

Well, it is not even as simple as believing “agency” sprouts between things more complicated than atoms and human beings. Let me make a ridiculously simple observation. 

Take the 2 slit exp. This phenomenon is the conceptual heart of Quantum Physics. If we take the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (CIQ, pronounced “SICK”), at face value, something astounding occurs: it looks as if an electron, or a photon, has AWARENESS. 

Indeed, according to Einstein, a photon in flight is a localized concentrated “quantum” (Einstein wrote about “Lichtquanten”, light quanta; they got named “photons” 20 years later). 

The following is exactly what Albert wrote, in his otherwise beautiful Nobel Prize winning paper on the photoelectric effect, and has been viewed as definitive truth ever since: “Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING…” (I view this Einstein unsupported opinion as a grave error which the herd has made ever since… But I am going to proceed, for the sake of argument, as if this ridiculous idea were true, in the next few lines!)

When one cuts two slits in a screen, a photon (going through just one slit, according to Einstein) somehow knows about the other slit. How? Certainly not by having Mr. Photon look over at the other slit. So, then, what is the root, the nature of this photon “awareness”, Einstein and his followers want us to believe in? 

A photon is aware of the other slit: could such an elementary particle’s awareness at a distance be the fundamental “element of consciousness“? (I am sarcastically parroting terminology of Einstein in 1935, introducing the notion of “elements of reality”) 

A shallow philosopher could chuckle that all consciousness comes from sensation, which comes from senses… And obviously the photon has no senses… Except, somehow, according to Einstein and CIQ, the photon (or any fundamental particle) senses the other slit at a distance (always under Einstein’s locality-of-the-quantum hypothesis, which permeates modern physics, a pervading poison gas)… So, according to them, the photon has a sense, somehow. 

Experiments With Bouncing Droplets such as these three above, were started in Paris in the Twenty-First Century. They provide with the first analogy to guide De Broglie’s Pilot Wave Theory of 1927 and the much more sophisticated SQPR… A problem for the Pilot Wave Theories being that we have NO mathematical models… As mathematicians prefer often to focus on silly problems posed by infinities, the modern analogue of the worry an infinite number of sitting angels on pinheads posed to Middle Age Catholic bishops….

“The surface waves generated by the silicon oil droplets above are analogous to quantum mechanical waves that guide the dynamics of quantum particles. While the droplets move like quantum particles, they behave like quantum waves.”… says award winning photographer and physicist Dr Aleks Labuda, who took the picture above.

Guiding Wave (GW) partisans, such as yours truly, don’t have the problem of the telepathic, all aware photon endowed with Free Will: the Guiding Waves go through both slits of the 2 slit experiment, and thereafter “guides” the photon accordingly to the presence of these two slits. (The experimental models of the 2 slits, with bouncing liquid balls, exists… and thus have attracted great hatred from partisans of the Copenhagen Interpretation, such as from the grandson of Niels Bohr, himself a physicist. I will not put links, so as not to confuse readers…)

So, basically, if one rejects a strange photon “awareness”, implicitly assumed by CIQ, one is immediately led to Guiding Waves theories. To this people familiar with the Foundations of Quantum Physics may retort that a GW theory such as De Broglie-Bohm is indistinguishable from CIQ. Right. But I don’t think De Broglie-Bohm Guiding Wave can withstand the EPR 1935. Moreover, my own theory, SQPR, is distinguishable from CIQ: SQPR produces Dark Matter… CIQ doesn’t.

In any case, a GW theory is a mechanical, non local, field of awareness (Bohm makes it into a Quantum Potential). [1]

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With Quantum Physics, we find ourselves back into the ultra-deterministic setting of the Eighteenth Century… But now with a theory which claims to understand everything (whereas in the 18C-19C, some pieces were missing, and not just the two clouds on the horizon  Lord Kelvin saw in the distance…) So the Quantum should explain Consciousness, Free Will… As it explains the universe. But, clearly, it contradicts Free Will… EXCEPT, if one considers nonlocal effects. Nonlocal effects violate local determinism.

The preceding essay stands as a testimony of the usefulness of the philosophical approach to dig deeper into what physics should become in the (hopefully) near future [2]. Not that it was ever different each time physics jumped ahead. All revolutions in physics have been revolutions in philosophy… and the most general revolutions in philosophy often preceded revolutions in physics and science in general [3]. For example, the Renaissance of the Eleventh Century preceded the Buridan (and his schools!) astronomical, physical and mathematical revolution after 1350 CE. In turn it may have accelerated the Fifteenth-Sixteenth Century philosophical Renaissance which clearly led to the Seventeenth Century scientific and technological revolutions, an ambitious protest against more modest understanding.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] One thing that makes SQPR different from De Broglie-Bohm (DBB), is that SQPR supposes the Guiding Field proceeds, expanding or collapsing, at an extremely fast… but NOT infinite… speed. Another is that the Guiding Field carries minute, but non zero mass-energy. Both effects together predict the Dark Matter effect… Also SQPR makes Quantum Entanglement a mass-energy conveyor, hence non-magical, another deviation from both CIQ and DBB…

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[2] Quantum Computers exploit the Foundations of the Quantum… but not through the brute force of Quantum Field Theory and its (glaringly very incomplete and haphazard) “Standard Model” ….the one with no model for Dark Matter or Dark Energy. So Quantum Computers bring the foundations, such as Quantum Entanglement, crucial for their operations, into focus… Hence expect foundations to become ever more crucial in the common Zeitgeist…

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[3] This is particularly blatant reading Descartes, who justified his enormous advances in mathematics with a cocktail of philosophical and psychological observations of the most judicious types. Just as I question infinity, Descartes questioned the sort of proofs mathematicians had been satisfied with for two millennia… and did something about it (by inventing Algebraic Geometry)….

Tags: 2 slit, Copenhagen Interpretation, Einstein Error, Free Will, Philosophy of Physics, SQPR