Monday 5 December 2011

The trouble with physics

What with the demise of string theory, as related by Lee Smolin in his book The Trouble with Physics, the evoking of the multiverse and anthropic principle in an attempt to explain the universe, the apparent need to postulate mysterious dark matter and energy, and the faster than light cosmic expansion in inflation theory to account for the universe on the large scale and the seeming impossibility of clearly relating anything in physics to the nature of mind or consciousness  (rather than the brain), the thought could be that there is something very fumdamental that is missing in our presengt scientific understanding of the cosmos.

Smolin himself concludes that the trouble is either to do with the foundations of quantum theory or an  understanding the nature of time, and Smolin plumps for the problem of time.  Whereas in more than twenty years attempting to develop a theory of a nonlocally acting cause I have found quite a lot of reasons to choose the foundations of quantum theory as the real problem. 

So while Smolin and the string theorists have attempted to develop a theory that unifies the four fundamental interactions or general relativity with quantum theory, the question can be asked:  What do general relativity and quantum theory by themselves actuaqlly explain of the natural world and why should any unification of these theories provide a theory of everying that explains anything more than what they explain already without unification.?

So from a reasonable causal determinate theory, rather than an unreasonable indeterminate acausal Copenhagen-type interpretation, upon which standard model quantum theory is based, it can be concluded that a suficient explanation of how matter is the way that it is would require details to be sufficiently justified and described of a nonlocal cause of quantum wave, spin and entanglement behaviour.  And this could  have been reasonably concluded from the work of Louis de Broglie who began developing his pilot wave theory in 1923 or some two years before any development of quantum mechanics.
   
Thus the recent thorough reseach of Guido Bacciagaluppi and Antony Valentini in their book Quantum Theory at the Crossroads demonstrates that by 1927 de Broglie's theory was better developed than the quantum mechanics at the time, and better than any previous historian has suggested, including especially Max Jammer.  And for  82 years prior to Quantum Theory at the Crossroads, the propaganda of the Copenhagenists, including Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, effectively hid the fact that de Broglie's 1927 Pilot Wave theory was a workable account that was developed to be consistent with many quantum experiments.  So that David Bohm's 1952 account was only needed to clear up a naumber of outstanding issues, including the idea assumed and promoted by the Copenhagen School that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle necessarily described facts about the hidden behaviour of quantum objects, rather than just a limitation of measurement imposed by the quantum wave property.  This limitation indicated by the fact thay the Uncertainty Principle is calculated from Planck's constant and thus the the quantum wave frequency.

So a reasonable conclusion can be that no unified theory of local forces could ever explain the nonlocality of quantum physics as now indicated by many experiments and the Bell test experiments of quantum entanglement in particular.  But rather,  a general theory needs to be developed from enough observable evidence to sufficiently justify and describe details of a nonlocally acting cause from its universal effects in additiopn to those of the known forces.

See below for an abstract for such a general theory

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