Isaac Newton, where are you?

I am not a physicist.  Not even close.  I am about as far outside of the academic world of physics as you can get.  I don’t even know any physicists.  And I am sure that they would all laugh at me if I did.  My education was in economics.  My career was in IT.  Physics is simply a hobby.  And as I get older, I'd like to understand how we got here.  How did this experience of life come to be?  I would like to find out before I die.  And the physicists aren’t helping. 

I miss the classical equations.  Like F = ma.  Even though Isaac Newton didn’t formulate that equation directly, nor suggest that acceleration was a physical quantity in any edition of the Principia, he certainly implied it.  And good ole Isaac had a pretty good feel for how to construct a new theory.  It was all about simplicity.  If things were too complicated, you had walked down the wrong path, and you better turn around. 

"Truth," said Newton, "is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

What would Newton think of today’s quantum mechanics?  What would he think of the Superposition Principle?  The Probability Wave?  The Uncertainty Principle?  Like the rest of us, he’d be scratching his head, wondering "what the fuck is wrong with modern physics?" 

Quantum mechanics came to power because elementary particles are very small and very hard to understand.  And QM continues to hide behind that smallness.  The quantum physicists still aren’t sure of what is going on inside elementary particles. 

And because they aren’t, they have replaced physics equations with matrices, and physical quantities with probabilities.  But even in this glaring absence of physical understanding, they can still calculate.  Our old comforting picture of reality, which felt so intuitive, has bitten the dust.  Only to be replaced by matrices.

Matrices?  That doesn’t sound like physics.  It sounds like statistics.  Sure, we can get physical answers with matrices, but why do we suddenly care so much about probability?  We never cared about it before.  We hated probability.  That’s why people became physicists.  To get away from probability.  And now, suddenly, all we hear about is probability.  What the hell happened? 

This obsession with probability didn’t happen overnight.  The current edifice of modern physics is like a shapeshifting monster that contorts itself with each appearance of new contradictory evidence.  The monster doesn’t go away.  It simply becomes more complicated.

The standard models of both particle physics and cosmology seemed so promising once upon a time.  They were relatively simple, until they were continually undercut by new evidence.

So, what does a set of proposals do when upended by a new piece contradictory evidence?  It adds more proposals.  Maybe a new quark.  Asymptotic freedom.  Neutrino oscillation.  Dark matter.  Dark energy.  That’s not a good sign.

But it’s not just the outsiders scratching their heads at what the physicists have done to us.  There are plenty of critics of quantum physics among its practitioners.  Fritjof Capra sums up this love-hate relationship that many physicists have for QM:

"The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena.  The verbal interpretation, on the other hand - i.e., the metaphysics of quantum theory - is on far less solid ground.  In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model."

The Copenhagen Interpretation.  The Many-Worlds Theory.  Quantum Information Theory.  The Ensemble Interpretation.  There are about twenty different interpretations of quantum mechanics, from the deterministic to the mystical. 

While some of these provide some level of physicality and determinism to the quantum world, we are inclined to agree with the Quantum Information Theories, which posit that QM is simply a way of observing the world in order to calculate predictions about things we choose to conceive of. 

It isn’t the real world.  Just a way of defining observables, experiments, and outcomes.  As such, many of the mathematical methods used in QM can be applied to other fields with equal success, but limited usefulness.

For example, let’s take the field of economics.  We can easily structure a state vector to describe whether one is employed or not.  We can then formulate the requisite eigenvectors and Hermitian matrix to make predictions on the probability that this person is currently employed. 

But this would constitute the loss of causality in our approach to economics.  And nobody cares about economics formulated in this way.  Like nobody cared about probability, position, or momentum before the rise of QM.

And as a layperson, I have never seen a field of science that pats itself on the back more than quantum mechanics.  Crack open most entry level books on QM, and you are likely to read about how amazing the theory is at prediction.  You will read that the derivation of the anomalous magnetic moment of an electron agrees with the experimental value to within 10 significant digits, making it the most accurately verified prediction in the history of physics.

But if you look at how that was derived, along with other quantum calculations, that’s being overly generous.  There are many ad hoc adjustments that the physicists are introducing into quantum calculations, like renormalization, so you shouldn’t pat yourself on the back for a job well done. 

And given how QM approaches rudimentary problems, it looks a little like a card trick.  A stacked deck.  They had to do some funny business to get their result.  They had to "normalize" their eigenvectors and include imaginary numbers to get it to work.   The math seems to be "managed" to get the right answers. 

And in QM, you can make accurate predictions without understanding the underlying physical phenomena.  And perhaps that’s the greatest success and the greatest tragedy of quantum mechanics.  Prediction without understanding. 

To illustrate this, the QM mathematical formalism could also be applied to other fields of study.  Let’s take our previously mentioned example in economics.  We could create a state vector, [1 0], as the state of being employed in a job. 

So now we can give a person a job, and then put him through an employment detection process, which will light up if he has a job.  We can do this quite quickly by building the associated bra and ket eigenvectors and multiplying them together.  And magically, if we set up our eigenvectors properly, we will get 1 as a result, meaning the person has a job. 

The person was given a job, which we subsequently measured, and detected the fact that they had a job.  Genius.  And the new field of quantum economics racks up its first great success, to be followed by many more, as long as we construct our Hermitian matrices and eigenvectors appropriately.

But no one cares about quantum economics, or whether this individual has a job or not.  We just want to illustrate how the above QM methodology isn’t restricted to the world of physics.  It is a way of categorizing observables into matrix form and contorting this matrix formalism by using normalization and complex numbers that allow us to compute probability that an observable is in some sort of "state" we've decided to define and subsequently try to detect.

Before quantum mechanics, no one cared about the probability that a particle was in some position somewhere in space.  Is there anything less interesting about a particle than that? 

At one time, probability was something that physicists strived to eliminate from their theories on the behavior of matter.  But with QM, it’s all you ever hear about.  And that does not feel right to some of us.

But hopefully, this is only a temporary condition.  Hopefully, humans will break through the current stalemate between probability and determinism.  And then we can look back at quantum mechanics as just another step on the road to a greater truth.  And that will be a great day.

As Steven Weinberg once aptly noted:

"There’s always a third possibility, that’s there’s something else entirely, that we’re going to have a revolution in science which is as much of a break with the past as quantum mechanics is a break from classical physics. That’s a possibility. It may be that a paper from a graduate student tomorrow morning will lay it out.  By definition I don’t know what that would be."

 

Isaac Newton, where are you?

 

Please send comments to Charles Brack at brack@wtfphysics.com

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