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In a few pages a new quantum theory is presented, against the shortcomings of the old. Actually, it is strange that no one has done this before, think the author.

Everyone knows that new facts about our world, both in macro and micro cosmos, has rained over us the last few decades.

Therefore, it is easy to find all the pieces today, which was not the case in Einstein's time.

The author now calls on anyone interested in this subject to consider this proposal for a new physical synthesis on how light quanta, and quanta in general can work.

The entire world system is quantised The macro and micro cosmos hangs together in a very refined way. This is important for understanding the quanta laws. None of this has been the usual physics and cosmology discovery.

Sorry to say.

Ă…ke Hedberg

'What are light quanta?'

Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken. (Albert Einstein)

www.bod.se

Introduction to a new theory of quanta

'What are light quanta?'

Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.

(Albert Einstein)

Essays Ă…ke Hedberg

Contents *** The situation today Natural philosophy A few words about the new tools needed The new tools needed The concept of imaginary in mathematics.

What is a quantum jump?

And what are light quanta?

How a light photon which is neither a wave or a particle looks and functions The quantum mechanism The Quanta Laws Our Universe and Anti-universe in a few ďŹ gures The entire world system is quantised

'What are light quanta?'

Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.

(Albert Einstein, 1955)

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Essays Åke Hedberg Kiruna Sweden

aug. 2015

© 2015 Åke Hedberg Publishing and printing: BoD ISBN: 978-91-7463-819-6

The situation today * All these ďŹ fty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken. (Albert Einstein)1 I still do not believe that the statistical method of the Quantum Theory is the last word, but for the time being I am alone in my opinion. (Einstein)2 Quantum theory is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing.

Quantum theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He (God) does not throw dice. (Einstein)3 It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature. /‌/Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum physics cannot possibly have understood it.4 Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state truly represents. One possibility is that a pure quantum state corresponds directly to reality. However, there is a long history of suggestions that a quantum state (even a pure state) represents only knowledge or information about some aspect of reality. Here we show that any model in which a quantum state represents mere information about an underlying physical state of the system, and in which systems that are prepared independently have independent physical states, must make predictions which contradict those of quantum theory.5 I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me. I have studied most of them in depth and thought hard about them, and in the end I still can't make real sense of quantum theory as it stands. (Lee Smolin)6 In spite of much progress clarifying foundational issues in quantum mechanics, there remains persistent evidence that quantum mechanics is an approximation to a deeper theory.

(Lee Smolin).7

Not even Einstein knew what light quanta was. Despite the fact that every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knew it. And despite the fact that a theory of quantum ought to be absolutely essential and crucial to quantum physics and quantum mechanics.

If you dear reader still think he knew it, (after all, he was winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 in a related subject, you might say), you have therefore wrong. No other physicists also knew or know.

1

Albert Einstein, in a letter to his old friend Michael Besso, 1955.

2

Albert Einstein, On Quantum Theory,1936.

Albert Einstein, On Quantum Physics, Letter to Max Born, December 12, 1926.

4 Niels Bohr, On Quantum Physics 5 Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph. On the reality of the quantum state. lanl.arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1111.3328 (Submitted on 14 Nov 2011 (v1), last revised 18 Nov 2012 (this version, v3)) 6 From Wikipedia 7 From Wikipedia 3

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This fact also explains why Bohr writes that if they who “are not shocked” of the quantum mechanics, have not understood it. I myself am most shocked by the physicists did not listen more to what Einstein had to say. Though Bohr had a completely Institute behind ...But maybe today, you say. Now in the 2000s?

It is possible now today that someone has defined and described what light quanta and all other electromagnetic quanta are. It is possible. And it would be really sad if no one has yet done it, let me know in that case. I have followed developments in the fields for many decades, but have not seen any of this. (Quotations from Smolin gives the evidence of this.)

Nevertheless, a clear theory about light quanta is fundamental for the whole of modern physics, which is called quantum physics and quantum mechanics. How is that possible? I will return to the issue only mention that one reason why not the good Einstein could explain what light quanta are, is that all the facts of the matter were not available at this time. It was missing important pieces.But today, lacking nothing. This is the situation today. * As we see from the quotes the old master Einstein were in many ways critical of the new physics theory, as in the early 1900s became known quantum mechanics or more generally mentioned quantum physics.

Even to us more contemporary physicists Lee Smolin, Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph… Nor does Smolin thought quantum mechanics was the last word; it was not the real thing, there was something deeper …

In the 1920s it became scientific establishment with Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others faced with the requirement to solve the mystery of light peculiar nature. For in the late 1800s had accurate measurements demonstrated that the speed of light (c) was constant, and in 1900 could Max Planck show that it was somehow quantised when light energy was proportional to his constant (h).

Albert Einstein than used Planck's relationship in 1905 to explain the results of the photoelectric effect which showed that the energy E of ejected electrons was dependent upon the frequency ƒ of incident light as described in the equation E=hƒ. It is ironic that in 1921 Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, and then for more than thirty years later, frustrated ask his old friend what light quanta are, as we see from the quote.

The long-accepted view of the light to the undulating, soon came to naught when its sectional side was discovered through experiments.

Wave–particle duality is the concept that every elementary particle or quantic entity exhibits the properties of not only particles, but also waves. It addresses the inability of the classical concepts "particle" or "wave" to fully describe the behaviour of quantum-scale objects. As Ein-

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stein wrote: "It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do”. (Wikipedia).

In 1954 he wrote:

In the year nineteen hundred, in the course of purely theoretical (mathematical) investigation, Max Planck made a very remarkable discovery: the law of radiation of bodies as a function of temperature could not be derived solely from the Laws of Maxwellian electrodynamics.

To arrive at results consistent with the relevant experiments, radiation of a given frequency ƒ had to be treated as though it consisted of energy atoms (photons) of the individual energy hƒ, where h is Planck's universal constant.

This discovery became the basis of all twentieth-century research in physics and has almost entirely conditioned its development ever since.

Without this discovery it would not have been possible to establish a workable theory of molecules and atoms and the energy processes that govern their transformations. Moreover, it has shattered the whole framework of classical mechanics and electrodynamics and set science a fresh task: that of finding a new conceptual basis for all physics. Despite remarkable partial gains, the problem is still far from a satisfactory solution.8

And again in the end of his life we read: …the problem is still far from a satisfactory solution. Well, what's up today? Is there any possibility after so many years of research to get a sense of these problems. Can we get a more logical and clearer picture how this light and matter as both waves and particles actually works?

Let me start with a longer quote from a fairly recent article in the BBC's magazine FUTURE.9 This is to show some of the problems that quantum theory drawn with over the years and which increasingly come to crystallise. The title is: Will we ever… understand quantum theory?

Quantum mechanics must be one of the most successful theories in science. Developed at the start of the twentieth century, it has been used to calculate with incredible precision how light and matter behave — how electrical currents pass through silicon transistors in computer circuits, say, or the shapes of molecules and how they absorb light. Much of today’s information technology relies on quantum theory, as do some aspects of chemical processing, molecular biology, the discovery of new materials, and much more.

Yet the weird thing is that no one actually understands quantum theory. The quote popularly attributed to physicist Richard Feynman is probably apocryphal, but still true: if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t. That point was proved by a poll among 33 leading thinkers at10a conference in Austria in 2011. This group of physicists, mathematicians and philosophers was given 16 multiple-

Albert Einstein, 1954 http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130124-will-we-ever-get-quantum-theory 10 arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1301.1069 8

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choice questions about the meaning of the theory, and their answers displayed little consensus.

Actually a scandal, the base of our technology is something that no one understands! Least of all do the cultural elite, I suppose. And how about the politicians who has control over the money to CERN and other research institutes?

Is that why we still are stuck with oil, coal, gas and nuclear power plants that threaten to poison and destroy our environment and the earth? Must we wait until sea level rises so much that millions and billions of people forced to flee to safer places? And how should we handle all these hundreds of nuclear power plants that are being overflow like Fukushima in Japan? Almost all are placed near an ocean. How should we handle a failed financial global system? The article in the BBC's magazine FUTURE continues:

That’s because quantum theory poses all sorts of strange questions that stretch the limits of our imagination — forcing us, for example, to conceive of objects like electrons that can, in different circumstances, be either waves or particles.

Not nowadays! Please see page 45 a picture of an electron which is neither a wave or a particle. The article in the BBC’s magazine continues:

One of the most controversial issues concerns the role of measurements. We’re used to thinking that the world exists in a definite state, and that we can discover what that state is by making measurements and observations. But quantum theory (“quantum mechanics” is often regarded as a synonym, although strictly that refers to the mathematical methods developed to study quantum objects) suggests that, at least for tiny objects such as atoms and electrons, there may be no unique state before an observation is made: the object exists simultaneously in several states, called a superposition. Before measurement, all we can say is that there is a certain probability that the object is in state A, or B, or so on. Only during the measurement is a “choice” made about which of these possible states the object will possess: in quantum-speak, the superposition is “collapsed by measurement”. It’s not that, before measuring, we don’t know which of these options is true — the fact is that the choice has not yet been made.

This is probably the most unsettling of all the conundrums posed by quantum theory. It disturbed Albert Einstein so much that he refused to accept it all his life. Einstein was one of the first scientists to embrace the quantum world: in 1905 he proposed that light is not a continuous wave but comes in “packets”, or quanta, of energy, called photons, which are in effect “particles of light”. Yet as his contemporaries, such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, devised a mathematical description of the quantum world in which certainties were replaced by probabilities, Einstein protested that the world could not really be so fuzzy. As he famously put it, “God does not play dice.” (Bohr’s response is less famous, but deserves to be better known: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”)

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And more from BBC’s magazine: Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen Schrödinger figured out an equation that, he said, expressed all we can know about a quantum system. This knowledge is encapsulated in a socalled wave function, a mathematical expression from which we can deduce, for example, the chances of a quantum particle being here or there, or being in this or that state. Measurement “collapses” the wave function so as to give a definite result. But Heisenberg showed that we can’t answer every question about a quantum system exactly. This is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more precisely you determine an electron’s momentum (as measured by mass multiplied by velocity), the less you can know about its position in space, and vice versa. In other words, there are some pairs of properties for which an increasingly accurate measurement of one of them renders the other ever fuzzier.

What’s more, no one really knows what a wave function is. It was long considered to be just a mathematical convenience, but now some researchers believe it is a real, physical thing.11 Some think that collapse of the wave function during measurement is also a real process, like the bursting of a bubble; others see it as just a mathematical device put into the theory “by hand” — a kind of trick. The Austrian poll showed that these questions about whether or not the act of measurement introduces some fundamental change to a quantum system still cause deep divisions among quantum thinkers, with opinions split quite evenly in several ways.

Bohr, Heisenberg and their collaborators put together an interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s that is now named after their workplace: the Copenhagen interpretation. This argued that all we can know about quantum systems is what we can measure, and this is all the theory prescribes — that it is meaningless to look for any “deeper” level of reality. Einstein rejected that, but nearly two-thirds of those polled in Austria were prepared to say that Einstein was definitely wrong. However, only 21% felt that Bohr was right, with 30% saying we’ll have to wait and see.

Nonetheless, their responses revealed the Copenhagen interpretation as still the favourite (42%). But there are other contenders, one of the strongest being the Many Worlds interpretation formulated by Hugh Everett in the 1950s. This proposes that every possibility expressed in a quantum wave function corresponds to a physical reality: a particular universe. So with every quantum event — two particles interacting, say — the universe splits into alternative realities, in each of which a different possible outcome is observed. That’s certainly one way to interpret the maths, although it strikes some researchers as obscenely profligate.

One important point to note is that these debates over the meaning of quantum theory aren’t quite the same as popular ideas about why it is weird. Many outsiders figure that they don’t understand quantum theory because they can’t see how an object can be in two places at once, or how a particle can also be a wave. But these things are hardly disputed among quantum theorists. It’s been rightly said that, as a physicist, you don’t ever come to understand them in any intuitive sense; you just get 11

On the reality of the quantum state lanl.arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1111.3328

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used to accepting them. After all, there’s no reason at all to expect the quantum world to obey our everyday expectations. Once you accept this alleged weirdness, quantum theory becomes a fantastically useful tool, and many scientists just use it as such, like a computer whose inner workings we take for granted. That’s why most scientists who use quantum theory never fret about its meaning — in the words of physicist David Mermin, they “shut up and calculate”, which is what he felt the Copenhagen interpretation was recommending.

So will we ever get to the bottom of these questions? Some researchers feel that at least some of them are not really scientific questions that can be decided by experiment, but philosophical ones that may come down to personal preference. One of the most telling questions in the Austrian poll was whether there will still be conferences about the meaning of quantum theory in 50 years time. Forty-eight percent said “probably yes”, only 15% said “probably no”. Twelve percent said “I’ll organise one no matter what”, but that’s academics for you.

More from BBC’s magazine:

In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of subatomic particles in particle physics and quasiparticles in condensed matter physics. A QFT treats particles as excited states of an underlying physical field, so these are called field quanta.

For example, quantum electrodynamics (QED) has one electron field and one photon field; quantum chromodynamics (QCD) has one field for each type of quark; and, in condensed matter, there is an atomic displacement field that gives rise to phonon particles. Edward Witten describes QFT as "by far" the most difficult theory in modern physics.

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Another type of criticism delivered the famous physicist and philosopher Karl Popper. (See footnote 12.) He has written and analysed much how and why modern physics which, with its Copenhagen interpretation, came in a severe crisis in the 1920s. He writes:

Today, the physics of a crisis. / ... / But there is also another aspect of this crisis: it is also a crisis of understanding. This crisis of our under-

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In a few pages a new quantum theory is presented, against the shortcomings of the old. Actually, it is strange that no one has done this before, think the author.

Everyone knows that new facts about our world, both in macro and micro cosmos, has rained over us the last few decades.

Therefore, it is easy to find all the pieces today, which was not the case in Einstein's time.

The author now calls on anyone interested in this subject to consider this proposal for a new physical synthesis on how light quanta, and quanta in general can work.

The entire world system is quantised The macro and micro cosmos hangs together in a very refined way. This is important for understanding the quanta laws. None of this has been the usual physics and cosmology discovery.

Sorry to say.

Ă…ke Hedberg

'What are light quanta?'

Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken. (Albert Einstein)

www.bod.se

Introduction to a new theory of quanta