Objective Reality

By Donald R. Miklich

The world 's greatest mystery is not an Agatha Christie story. It is the fact that science's most accurate and most unequivocally valid theory, quantum mechanics, is based on data which are logically impossible, the wave-particle paradox. A particle is a tiny piece of solid matter. A wave is the rhythmical slouching back-and-forth of multitudes of particles. Obviously, nothing can be both. But there are abundant data which appear to show fundamental matter is both. No one is content with this logical absurdity, so some of history's most brilliant scientists have tried to find or invent a rational explanation. They have provided more than a dozen different guesses, but none has won general acceptance. What is worse, all involve unbelievable claims or absurdities of their own. For example, the most widely accepted explanation says the universe doesn't really exist until someone looks at it. But if nothing exists, then who could look?! However, what many persons find most objectionable about these many hypothetical explanations (i.e., guesses) is their implication that physical reality is a subjective, mystical, magical process.

Einstein categorically rejected such mysticism. He thought a more fundamental theory would provide a scientific explanation. But his efforts to produce such a theory were a failure. The present book presents an opposite approach. It assumes quantum mechanics is scientifically complete, so it does not address the quantum mystery as a scientific problem. Rather, its approach is based on another Einsteinian suggestion. He said he was confident the explanation, when found, would be so simple that when stripped of the mathematics in which all physical theories are stated, it could be understood by a child. Following this suggestion the idea presented in the present book involves neither the technicalities nor math of quantum science. Rather it suggests a hidden mechanical procedure so elementary a child can understand it. Not only can this hidden process completely and logically explain the wave-particle paradox, it can also explain many other aspects of the quantum mystery. For example, it can explain the recently empirically proven but mind boggling nonlocality phenomenon (whereby a cause at one location has an effect elsewhere).

Were this all the model can explain it would be worthy of serious consideration. But it has a completely unintended additional benefit. The simple mentally picturable mechanical model can also explain the two puzzling phenomena of special relativity, completely unrelated phenomena. This result was unsought and unintended. Before the model was developed such an outcome would have been considered impossible. Therefore, this unexpected achievement strongly supports the model's believability.
Because this explanation is based on a process which is hidden, it can not be scientifically verified. Therefore, in no way whatsoever does it change the science of quantum mechanics. It only offers a hypothetical picture of the fundamental process of physical reality which is objective, completely logically consistent and intuitively understandable. For those willing to accept it, it offers a way to make sense of quantum reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald R. Miklich
• Release date: May 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463655689

Book preview

Preface to the Fourth Edition

You may have noticed an unusual omission in the Table of Contents. There is no Acknowledgements section. This is not from any lack of gratitude for those who have helped with this book. It's because I've had no helpers; no colleagues, students, agents, editors, etc. to vet preliminary drafts and point out errors and ambiguities. Necessity, not choice, was the reason. I'm simply an octogenarian with a hobby interest no one around me shares. Had I been younger (and wiser) I would have pulled out all stops to find persons who could have served in this capacity. But as an old man I had to be aware that if the ideas herein were to be shared, the time available for me to do so might be limited. Which meant this book should be put out as quickly as possible. Hence there was no time to seek out reviewers.

Fortunately, my lifespan has been longer that the demise of friends and acquaintances suggested it might. Unfortunately, the rereading of this book's first version, which this increase allowed, found several typos and similar mistakes. Because this book is on-line it was possible to readily make corrections. Editions 2 and 3 mainly repaired such minor glitches.

But subsequent rereadings showed first edition problems other than simple typos. Often material was presented in a less than lucid manner. In particular, the special relativity discussion in Part III could have been organized and presented more succinctly and with greater clarity. And that is what this fourth edition attempts to do, rewrite the book to improve its comprehensibility. Therefore, it is nothing like the usual subsequent edition which serves to bring material up-to-data. The essential ideas have not been changed. They simply have been presented with greater clarity. There is only one addition: It is pointed out that the quantum interpretation presented here has the fortuitous ability to explain why special relativity's version of the Lorentz transformation equations are valid notwithstanding the fact that their inertial restrictions prevent them from ever being empirically shown.

There is one place, however, where this fourth edition corrects an egregious error. In the original description of compound energy exchange (the Quantum Jumps subhead of chapter Some Paradoxes and Puzzles Explained) I stupidly wrote proton when I meant to write positron. I have no idea how I did such a dumb thing. Though not as knowledgeable about physics as I would like to be, but I certainly know the difference between protons and positrons. Indeed, I included a warning in the original text to alert readers to the difference. But my fingers often don't do what my brain tells them to do. (Especially when I try to play the piano.) I hope earlier readers have not been confused by my error. Since the Appendix provides a more detailed explanation of a compound energy exchange, one which does not repeat this error, readers my not have been confused by my mistake. Profound apologies to all readers of my earlier editions. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa!

Anyone who finds typos or other problems in this fourth edition is requested to bring them to my attention. Observations, opinions, and such are also welcome, and I will (If I have anything worth saying.) try to respond.

Many thanks,

DRM

[e-mail]

Purpose

Quantum phenomena are the invisible micro processes underlying and causing us and everything we experience. Quantum mechanics is the scientific theory of these phenomena. It is precisely accurate and enormously useful, one of science’s best tools, perhaps its very best. Nevertheless, it provides no description of quantum entities, nor does it provide any explanation of how they work. Its greatest shortcoming, however, is its inability to resolve the mystery of the manifestly self-contradictory data upon which it is based, the wave-particle paradox. Thus, though quantum mechanics is a superb engineering tool, it affords no intuitive understanding of the essentials of quantum phenomena.

Attempting to rectify this failure, physicists have invented many different quantum interpretations. An impartial judge must conclude they generally are totally unrealistic. Indeed, most add logical inconsistencies and paradoxes of their own. Because these interpretations are the inventions of scientists, the public may consider them scientific conclusions. They are not. Since all go beyond the evidence, all are merely metaphysical guesses. To provide consistency some are constructed in terms of the variables and processes of classical physics. Unfortunately, this merely muddles the matter because the quantum data are conspicuously inconsistent with these variables and processes. What is worse, some quantum interpretations are tinged with, and some are immersed in antiscientific mysticism and subjectivism. As such these interpretations only compound the mystery. At best, they are unconvincing. At worst, they are unbelievable.

The present book offers an alternative. It also goes beyond the evidence, so it also is a metaphysical speculation. But this interpretation is rigorously objective. It adheres to the traditional scientific premise that reality creates us, abjuring the mystical notion that we create it. And its explanation is so simple one can form mental pictures to see what it suggests. Were this its only characteristic this speculation would be worth consideration. However it can explain not only the wave-particle paradox, but also many other aspects of the quantum mystery as well as the special relativity theory mystery.

Nevertheless, since it is a metaphysical proposal, not a scientific conclusion, like all other quantum interpretations it is beyond empirical proof. Therefore, everyone must determine for one’s self whether it is believable, whether it makes sense to them. Accordingly, this book submits the interpretation to your judgment.

Part I presents a very brief, totally nontechnical and, in particular, a completely nonmathematical description of the wave-particle paradox and its history. It describes and critiques three of the most popular quantum mechanics interpretations.

Part II suggests a realistic and objective quantum physics interpretation, a mentally picturable, nonmathematical, non-mystical interpretation. Understanding it requires no knowledge whatsoever of math nor of quantum mechanics. Adopting Einstein’s contention that the quantum mystery is due to something hidden from the quantum data, it devises a hidden quantum entity and causal process based upon and consistent with such data as are available, one able to objectively explain not only the wave-particle paradox but many of the puzzles attributed to it.

Part III considers the unsought and unexpected finding that the quantum interpretation developed in Part II solely to explain the quantum mysteries can, without modification, also picturably explain the counterintuitive effects of special relativity. The serendipitous ability of an interpretation invented only to explain the quantum mystery to also explain the completely separate mysteries of special relativity, and to do so without any alteration whatsoever, strongly supports the interpretation's believability.

A Note on Notes

Footnotes are the bane of expository writing. If a reader attends to them they break up the continuity of the material presented, requiring one to backtrack, often extensively, in order to get back into the flow of the discussion. But a reader who does not read them looses some, occasionally much of the material being presented. This latter problem is made more frequent by the typesetting practice of signifying footnotes with a small superscript, something easily overlooked. When they come to the bottom of a page, readers who have missed one of these tiny superscripts must either ignore the footnote and forego the information it conveys, or reread the entire page in an attempt to discover the material to which it pertains. For these reasons there are no footnotes in this book. If material deserves presentation it will be worked into the text. Matters which are unequivocally parenthetical will be enclosed in parentheses at the relevant location in the text.

The small superscripts problem also occurs with references. Therefore they are not used here. Instead, the practice common in scientific writing is followed. When the author of a referenced work is mentioned in the text, the date of the referenced work is placed in parentheses following the author’s name. Thus: Herbert (1985) uses the Airy pattern to show the wave aspect of electrons. But if an author is not named in the text, then his/her name and date will be given in parentheses at the relevant point of the text. Thus: Quantum mechanics has been called the language of nature (Pagels, 1983). More specific references will list appendix, chapter or page. Thus: Feynman (1965, pgs. 129 30) says the two slit demonstration conveys the whole quantum mystery. With an author’s name and the date of the referenced work an interested reader need only go to the References to identify it.

Another point about references must be made. This book is an expository essay, an opinion piece, if you will. It is neither a scholarly tome nor a scientific report. And it most unequivocally is not a text. It is addressed to educated lay persons, not scientists, though it is hoped physicists will read, consider and, if appropriate, criticize it. Therefore (and for other reasons explained in the Orientation chapter) the kind of exhaustive referencing appropriate for a scholarly work is not followed. While all vital physical points are referenced, many historical points are not. And because this is a completely nontechnical essay addressed to a popular audience, I have tried to reference only similar works. In keeping with this popular orientation, if I know of a quote by a competent scholar or scientist, I will reference it rather than dig out the original from the scientific literature.

One other convention followed here must be mentioned. In reading a preliminary draft I became aware of a frequent redundant usage, the physicist followed by a name. This is redundant because almost every person mentioned in the text is a physicist of one kind or another. Therefore, I have dropped the the physicist identifier. If a person (celebrities excepted) is named without being otherwise categorized, you may assume he/she is a physicist of some kind.

These conventions and considerations having been noted, let’s get on with the description of a realistic, objective, non-mystical, non-mathematical, intuitively comprehensible, mentally picturable, logic and evidence consistent, reality conception capable of explaining the quantum mystery, the special relativity mysteries and, especially, the wave-particle paradox.

DRM

Denver, Colorado

Part I: The Quantum Mystery

Introduction

Albert Einstein was a Jew; ethnically. But not religiously. In his definitive Einstein biography Abraham Pais (1982, pg. 36) says, Albert’s father was proud of the fact that Jewish rites were not practiced in his home. The family, he states, had an assimilationist disposition. Many Jews dislike the term assimilation. (A flavor of this is enjoyably conveyed by the I am easily assimilated aria of the Old Lady With One Hip in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide; lyrics by Bernstein himself and his wife Felicia.) So the fact that Pais, himself a Jew, used the term to describe the Einstein family may fairly be taken as indicating the depth of the family’s separation from the religion of their ancestors. Pais emphasizes that Einstein’s upbringing left an indelible nonreligious imprint on him by noting that he "did not become bar mitzvah, that is, he never was consecrated to Judaism as religious Jewish men, usually when teenagers, are. Also Pais reports Einstein never mastered Hebrew", the language of Jewish rites.

This secular disposition notwithstanding, at one time in his boyhood Einstein became deeply interested in and committed to matters religious. Although this interest was intense, it did not last long, being replaced by an equally intense interest in science. This incident could be viewed as simply an incidental growth event, a child’s sampling of various life orientations until one is found which fits. But I think a better interpretation sees it as evidence of the essence of Einstein’s fundamental lifelong goal. Let me consider this a bit in order to show exactly what I mean.

At first glance Einstein’s boyhood interest in religion would seem antithetical to his eventual career as a scientist. This is so because religion and science are usually seen as opposites. Indeed, there is much to justify this opinion. The essence of religion is unquestioning acceptance of, i.e., faith in, the tenets of one’s particular religion, be they based on intuition, tradition, sacred writings, or religious authorities. However, evidence based reason is supposed to be the only authority in science. And since we can never have all the evidence, science therefore demands eternal doubt. The most well established scientific conclusions are supposed to be tentative, perpetually vulnerable to modification or replacement in the light of better reasoning and/or further evidence.

In truth, however, the opposite practices of religion and science are overblown. For example, Christian fundamentalists correctly insist a literal reading of the Bible contradicts the scientific fact of evolution. But many millions of other Christians, sincere, practicing, faithful and devout other Christians, interpret the Bible in an allegorical manner which removes this contradiction. An excellent illustration of this is the Roman Catholic priest (whose identity I regret I do not know) who once said the Bible is certainly divinely inspired, but not a divinely inspired biology text.

Nor is there any lack among scientists of blind dogmatism, unwillingness to abandon or even consider alternatives to scientific conclusions which have been rendered suspect, or even disproved by changed reason and/or further evidence. As Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, once observed (Gregory 1988, pg. 71):

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see light, but rather because its opponents eventfully die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

An excellent exposé of scientific dogmatism is the recent book by Adam Becker (2018). The issue he addresses is the same one addressed in the present book, the nature of the reality underlying quantum phenomena. But the generally accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, claims this issue is a fantasy. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory and the foremost advocate of this interpretation, once famously said there is no quantum reality, only a quantum description (Bell, 1987, pg. 142; Kumar, 2008, pg. 320). As Becker shows, those young physicists who questioned this and sought a meaningful, realistic interpretation did so at risk of, and sometimes at a cost to their professional careers. Thus, according to Becker, the general body of physicists did not, and still do not treat the Copenhagen interpretation as necessarily tentative, but rather as a dogma as unquestionable to them as creationism is to religious fundamentalists.

And it is precisely this issue of realistic understanding of quantum mechanics which, I believe, demonstrates the identical goal underlying Einstein’s religious and scientific periods. Einstein never accepted Copenhagen’s claim of the impossibility of any realistic, objective explanation of quantum mechanics. He wanted to understand reality, and until quantum mechanics could provide such understanding he considered it self-evidently incomplete. He once said (Herbert, 1985, pg. 177):

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, … I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.

(When speaking of reality Einstein often referenced God. To my knowledge, he never explained this usage. However, since after his brief childhood episode he never practiced any religion it is presumed he used the word God as a metaphor for nature, which would be consistent with the pantheism of the philosopher Spinoza which he once endorsed.)

Knowledge of how the world was created is something most people seek in religion. We may presume it is what the young Einstein also sought there. But, as he states in his autobiographical note (Einstein, 1949, pgs. 3-5), at age twelve he abandoned religion because he became convinced many of the Bible stories could not be true. Thus, he changed his orientation not because his life goal changed. He still intensely wanted a complete understanding of reality, but he concluded science was a more trustworthy route to it.

Quite obviously, therefore, Einstein’s pursuit of complete understanding would place him at loggerheads with Copenhagen’s insistence that such understanding is impossible. But though other physicists respect him, indeed, for many this respect amounts to veneration, apparently most accept something like Copenhagen or a version thereof. (There are different versions. However, all agree no realistic, objective, picturable understanding of quantum phenomena is scientifically possible.) Whether or not they believe there is a reality underlying quantum mechanics, most physicists consider it scientifically unfathomable. And they consider Einstein’s goal to be as illusory as the quest for the legendary Holy Grail.

But Copenhagen, while it may be believed and taught dogmatically, most certainly was not developed dogmatically. Different persons may define it differently, but basically it or Copenhagen-like interpretations are accepted because the evidence does not reveal the nature of any reality underlying quantum phenomena, and there is compelling reason to believe no more fundamental evidence is possible. The data themselves so suggest. Many physicists, I suspect, do not accept Bohr’s contention of no quantum reality. I think many, if not most, are sure there is such. Indeed, no matter what he once said, even Bohr himself, some scholars have argued, really believed there existed a quantum reality. But physicists generally (and Bohr too, if he really believed in a quantum reality) are convinced no evidence can exist to reveal its nature. With abundant good reason they believe any absolute understanding is scientifically inaccessible. Thus many resign themselves to one or another Copenhagen or Copenhagen-like interpretation. This provides a philosophical modus vivendi, something philosophers, and physicists in their philosophic moments, may argue about. But for those not interested in philosophizing, it justifies their turning from quantum mechanics’ reality ambiguities to the cookbook use of it as the superb engineering tool it is.

Quantum mechanics is widely considered to be the greatest, most precisely accurate of all science theories. As Rothman and Sudarshan (1998, pg. 116) have said, Quantum mechanics … is as close to true as science gets. Nevertheless, fundamental quantum phenomena are simply incomprehensible. This has probably best been stated by Richard Feynman who, although not explicitly endorsing Copenhagen implicitly conceded something like it must be accepted because the quantum data themselves preclude any complete scientific explanation. Feynman (1965, pg. 129) said:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. ... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

As is clear from the title of the book containing this quote, The Character of Physical Law, Feynman was speaking as a physicist, a scientist. Thus, when he said nobody knows, the knowledge he referenced was scientific knowledge. As such his claim has never been challenged. But there are other kinds of knowledge. The religious knowledge which preoccupied the boy Einstein is an obvious example. Conceivably a different, non-scientific kind of knowledge may explain how it can be like that.

Presenting a possible such explanation is the purpose of this book. In no way does it seek nor presume to improve or complete quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is here considered to be scientifically valid and as complete as it empirically can be. But, as everyone agrees, it is profoundly puzzling. All the present book seeks to do is present an objective interpretation of quantum