Copenhagen is Wrong!

The house of cards that is Quantum Theory is really starting to fall...

And now Lee Smolin is on-side.

In a recent Perimeter Institute Lecture, Smolin delivered the trenchant view that the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory is in fact wrong, and I agree with him!

However, while his Realist arguments were indeed correct, and Copenhagen Theory is totally Idealist: that, I'm afraid that will never be enough.

For, in spite of Hegel's profound and transforming criticisms of the Plurality of both Formal Logic and its use in Science, almost 200 years later his improvements have still rarely been applied to either. The Copenhagenists will never relinquish their theory, for they don't even know why it arose, due to profound errors in its premises, and also because in all the circumstances in which they use it - it certainly does work - pragmatically! But, even then, it also never explains why.

For Explanation, as the primary purpose of Physics, has now been totally abandoned. Instead, this so-called Theory gives the right quantitative answers, in highly-constrained circumstances only. And, in doing that, it is entirely consistent with what Modern Physics has now become - an extension of Mathematics.

For, henceforth, it can never explain why things happen the way that they do, but can only "match" how it works purely pragmatically. It is content to be only technologically-useful, amd hence explains absolutely nothing!

Now, of course, its supporters would all totally disagree with this, because of the pseudo-philosophical inventions that the originators inserted, in order to make it look like an "Explanatory Theory" - namely, via their cobbled together Equation, which imports illegitimate probabilities into a basic Wave Equation. And then replaces all Particles, at what they term "The Quantum Level", with Wave/Particle Duality - delivering the alternatives of using the wave-like Equation, until the entity suddenly became, once more, a descrete Particle, and they could term the transition "The Collapse of the Wave Equation", when it resumed its Particle Form.

It is, of course, NO kind of Legitimate Scientific Theory: it is a clever fix to get around contradictory behaviours, that their prior premises just could not cope with. And, that was indeed the case: the prior theories just didn't work at these levels: they were inadequate, it is true!

But, literally all the theories in the past were also inadequate, but were re-investigated to review the premises assumed, and usually, they, in the end, would finally arrive at something better! By the early 20th Century, however, a whole series of dramatic and debilitating results had begun to be revealed that undermined the prior assumptions.

The Michelson/Morley Experiment had dismissed the existence of the Aether as filling all of Empty Space with a Universal Substrate.

And, Henri Poincaré and Ernst Mach, finding ever more physical premises that seemed to be wrong, proposed Empirio Criticism, a form of Positivism, as an Amalgam of Explanations and Mathematical Equations, which together, they believed, could deliver what was needed.

The Piste was set: and it was all downhill from there to finally dumping Explanations altogether!

For, nobody demurred at the conclusions from the Michelson/Morley Experiment, so Wave-like phenomena, at the Sub Atomic Level, could no longer be ascribed to that now dispensed-with medium: instead, somehow, such effects had to be embedded into what Particles actually were themselves!

The key experiments were those involving Double Slits, which became the touchstones for many of the new discoveries. But, the Wave/Particle tricks which were instituted to explain the many anomalies, are very easily removed by assuming an undetectable Universal Substrate in those experiments, and Substrate Theory immediately dispensed-with every single one of them.

Now, though obviously insufficient by itself, this theoretical exercize could not be ignored! For, it demonstrated that classical Waves were somehow involved: the Wave/Particle Duality invention was a frig! And distinct Waves and Particles were, somehow, still intrinsically involved.

Two parallel lines of theoretical research were undertaken.

The First was to investigate the possibility of such an Undetectable Universal Substrate - composed entirely of pairs of mutually-orbiting Leptons of diametrically opposite properties - thus delivering the required passive-undetectability, while at the same time allowing that Substrate to be affected-by those interlopers, while also delivering the subsequent affecting-of those very same entities, in differing, later circumstances.

It must be stressed that the objective here was a theory-first investigation: just as James Clerk Maxwell had used in his Analogistic Model of the Aether, which was the Basis for his still universally renowned Electromagnetic Equations!

[Indeed, there is the very sound point also, that theory-first investigations actually avoid the inevitable pluralistic aberrations of all data-first investigations, using the now Standard Scientific Experimental Method of directly constrained and maintained contexts]

And, as Frank Wilczec has recently insisted upon with "The Materiality of the Vacuum", the above theoretical Analogistic Model is not without foundation, even if his composition of that "undetectable Universal Substrate" differs from that used here.

James Clerk Maxwell's Analogistic Model, has long gone, BUT its use was justified by its delivery of the Electromagnetic Equations!

Now, the Second line of theoretical research was somewhat akin to Maxwell's - by assuming such a substrate with the New Model's composition, could all the anomalies that precipitated Copenhagen be physically explained instead?

Now to achieve this objective, the initial simple definition in terms of Electron/Positron, mutually orbiting pairs, had to be extended to also involving Units composed of Taus and Muons, and even Neutrinos, but a rich and successful Substrate of Leptons was devised, and the inventions of Copenhagen physically replaced!

BUT, of course, this is just like Maxwell's Aether Model, the detailed content of the Analogistic Model of the Universal Substrate will, indeed, be wholly replaced too!

This researcher, like Maxwell, knows very well that all our theories are never the Absolute Truth, but at best, contain sufficient Objective Content to deliver more than what they replace.

Criticisms of the New Model are not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary. Yet, criticisms that exist only in order to re-establish Copenhagen are most certainly NOT! Copenhagen is a dead-end, and new ideas and models are now required to replace it and push Physics into new territory.

Implicit in the new approach was a root and branch critique of the premises, and even basic amalgamated philosophical stances, underlying modern physics. Succintly, Copenhagen is Pluralist, while Reality is Holist!

And Science should be materialist, while Copenhagen is certainly idealist!

By all means improve upon the New Physics, but leave Copenhagen where it derserves to be - Dead and Buried!

 

For more on burying the Copenhagen Interpretation, please read the Special Issues of SHAPE Journal above, and look out for our forthcoming 10 Year Anniversary Issues on Substrate Theory.

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Time

“Time is invention and nothing else.” Henri Bergson

Time is not a ticking clock. It is the measure of qualitative change. 

The Time Machine (1960)

A recent BBC Horizon programme, which purports to be a serious, if popularising regular Science event, took an odd and askance view of Time, even including Time Machines and the possibility of building one. But, in the part of the programme I was able to catch, only one scientist, Lee Smolin, addressed Real Time.

For, Time is what separates incremental, quantitative science, from developing, indeed, evolutionary science: The Science of Qualitative and Revolutionary-Creative Changes. The rest talked at length about "Time" as it occurs in Formal Equations, in other words, NOT time in the Real Concrete World, but "Time" as it exists in Ideality, (along with the "Dimensions of Space", which in Ideality can be as many as you like) within the world of Pure Forms alone- the realm of Mathematics, a totally pluralist world, which can only be made to approximate to Reality in very carefully filtered-and-constrained Stabilities. For, Reality-as-is is most definitely holistic and NOT pluralistic.

Now, one of the features of the Pluralist Stance, apart from its tenet of a World composed only of eternal Natural Laws, and hence wholly excluding any possibility of Qualitative Change, or any means of explaining real development, has therefore, to be the surprising inclusion of Time at all (apart, that is, as relegated to a purely quanitative variable - as with everything else in that realm). Indeed, even when Time is included in Equations, it is only as just such a variable: "Time simply passes, proceeds incrementally, as do all other variables along with it!".

Hence, such time doesn't change qualitatively, into something else: it is more like an alternative "ruler" of merely quantitative changes in something else! Like the dimensions of Space, that of Time is similar, merely an overall context - an independant stage upon which everything happens.

Yet, Qualitative Changes do indeed happen to other variables, and the precise times when they occur are important. Indeed, using a particular quantitative variable to signal exactly when a qualitative change is due to happen (from prior experience), became a regular totally non-causal pragmatic frig within all scientific reasoning.

Absolutely NO explanation would be involved, just a pragmatic if-then insertion to a wholly new situation where the change was already ready and waiting to be involved. Indeed, sometimes a whole set of techniques can be recorded exclusively using such flips and no explanations whatsoever, in producing a required result: it is termed Technology! And, as one of my disciplines is Computing, (particularly Computers-in-Control), I am well aware of its value in Computer Programming too.

But, Time has, in all of these situations, been totally dredged of all its qualities, which are necessarily-intrinsic to literally all Qualitative Changes, but never revealed. We see Time as merely an accumulating number - an abstraction - much more easily handled, than its necessary role in many qualitative changes.

Let us take a crucial one - Birth!

In every single second, literally millions of new living entities are born.

The time since their conception is, for each type of entity relatively fixed, but it cannot be wholly embodied in a ticking clock. Indeed, what must be going on, has to be a complex, multi-interacting set of processes of development that can only deliver its result, when all of those finally deliver-together a viable entity, which is then born!

What results is an integrated and persisting, self-maintaining system, in which vast numbers of contributing components, are now integrated and co-operating parts.

With human beings, we may give the period of pregnancy a quantitative-length of 9 months, with the Birth happening at the end of such a period, but what has had to actually occur, in turning a single fertilised egg into a new human being, is the caused development of an amazing system: that 9 months is only an overall measure in time of that miraculous, time-involved, real process!

Time is not just a significant quantitative measure of time-elapsed, but what is involved in every contributing process, and affecting inter-relationship in allowing all of that system to deliver appropriately. And, the final Time will be intimately determined by the conditions involved: the overall time will vary dependant upon different conditions. And sometimes those conditions are not fulfilled, and the whole process is aborted automatically.

The arguments involved here may seem somewhat laboured, but the intention is to bury the myth that Time is a mere incremental measure, and consider it as intrinsic in all holistic systems of processes delivering qualitative change.

The above ideas can only mean something significantly new within a Holist stance, rather than the usual pluralist stance, and the clearest example of the differences are delivered in the events involved in major significant qualitative changes - that is within Emergent Episodes, when systems of interacting processes actively and causally precipitate the final flip into a new mode.

And, widening the study drastically over longer time periods, and significantly different Levels of Reality bring both the Origin of Life, and its subsequent Evolution, and even Social Revolutions into consideration too. At such scales Qualitative Changes are the only significant ones, and alone enable Real Explanations for what is going on.

Perhaps the most revealing and crucial System of such processes, is that revealed by this theorist, in his description of what he termed Truly Natural Selection, as it pertained to the evolution of non-living processes in the necessary precursor developments to the amazing Origin of Life itself.

Indeed, it was only in addressing this essential Phase that he, himself, finally realised the only way that usually separate-and-transitory chemical processes could finally become both continuing and integrating factors, and, without which, Life could never have emerged!

NOTE: Inspect any diagram of Metabolic Pathways to see just how amazing that chemical system had to become before Life could become possible.

All the metabolic pathways which happen inside every living cell

New Special Issue: The Philosophy of Physics

Special Issue 56 - The Philosophy of Physics

Read it here

I’ll get the first controversial statement out of the way: There is no Philosophy of Physics!

At least, not any longer.

Having committed myself to the study of Physics some 60 years ago, I chose it as my specialism at University entirely because, historically, the discipline had always tried to both understand and fully explain reality - I was then presented with a worldwide major retreat from such essential objectives, established mainly by the triumph of Bohr and Heisenberg at Solvay some years before, and the gradual acceptance of their Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, literally everywhere.

It was, of course inevitable, though I couldn’t see it at the time.

The seeds had been set long ago, with our generally pragmatic approach to investigating the physical world, which was only further complicated by the inclusion of Idealism from Mathematics, and of a Plurality underlying all attempts at explaining phenomena.

From its very outset Physics was actually a strange amalgam of Materialism, Idealism and Pragmatism, a distorted reflection of the world which could only prosper while its discoveries could be profitably used. And, the methods of carefully cultivating experimental situations (to make them easier to study), and idealistically mapping pure ideal forms onto studied situations, began to wrest the subject from its explanatory role, from ‘Natural Philosophy’, and into that of mere technological implementation.

In the end, the old explanations began to fail, and were abandoned for the seeking of equations. Attempts to truly understand reality were jettisoned, and what had been Physics greatest asset was lost.

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, 2005

Time Reborn by Lee Smolin

A very interesting look at the crisis in physics by Smolin

I've been reading a great book by Lee Smolin entitled Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. In it Smolin seems to reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and contemporary physics generally, for very similar philosophical reasons to myself.

This quote from a book review by The Guardian seems to sum his position up rather neatly:

the reason physicists have come to reject the reality of time is that they have been bewitched by the beauty and success of the mathematical models they use into mistaking those models for reality. For timelessness, though not really a feature of our world, is a feature of mathematics...

and

To think like this, Smolin claims, is to forget, or to deny, that the objects of mathematics – numbers, curves etc – do not exist, whereas physics concerns itself with what does exist, and, in reality, in the domain of things that do exist, time is inescapable.

Very interesting stuff. More to follow on this soon...