Fact Check, debunking obviously false information

    Quote from axil

    Thus, by controlling the properties of the quantum observer the scientists managed to control the extent of its influence on the electrons' behavior.


    Nature is given by Maxwell equations. To measure a B field you need a current and to measure a current you need a B field. This is also the basis of information theory that exactly shows how uncertainty arises because quantization is given by the measurement and finally by the probability of the value measured as there is no measurement without interaction.


    Information theory is the fundament for measurement of signals -somethings physicists seem to forget or just never learnt.

    Quote

    One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.


    What it so bizarre about it? One cannot observe something without exchanging some energy with observed object, one cannot exchange energy with subject without affecting it - the opposite is what the perpetuum mobile is called. This is what was originally opposed in this very thread. Not accidentally the minimal energy required for affecting the object and making an observation is just the energy of microwave noise field which surrounds all of us - everything smaller than that would disapper in this background noise.

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    The Trouble with Many Worlds

    Today I want to talk about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and explain why I do not think it is a complete theory.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    ...A quick note for people who might think this merits attention: the problem in fundamental physics is not to explain just one particle in terms of one other, but to explain all particles.re complex than is told here. The partial (and mathematically void) links made here are more likely to point in the wrong direction than the right.


    Hi. I'm happy to talk about other particles. For example, when you take a close look at the properties, the neutrino appears to be more like the photon than the electron.


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Both papers ignore the electron's interaction with the W and Z particles, and ignore the implications for the muon, tau lepton, and quarks. That's because even in their hand-waving, free-form speculation, they can see that their story explains nothing. Like the Ancient Greeks explaining sunrise and the change of seasons, a separate god has to be created to explain every facet of every particle, and they soon lose the track of their narrative. It is less a physical explanation than a dreary theistic soap opera, but instead of gods per se, it is stocked with airy conceits that the authors can't or won't put into math to be confronted with physical experiment.


    We've never actually seen a W or a Z. Their existence was inferred from decay products. See the January 2003 physicsworld article Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z by Gary Taubes. Nobody has ever seen a quark either. Note this in the Wikpedia tau particle article: "They did not detect the tau directly, but rather discovered anomalous events". Muons are short-lived, lasting for circa two millionths of a second. So I think it's reasonable for an electron paper not to include the electron's interaction with the W and Z and other particles.


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    That does not mean that an electron is not (in some deeper unified spacetime and QM theory) related to a photon. But we have many more particles to make sense of (if we are not to ignore experiment) and much other stuff too. So the story would need to be a lot more complex than is told here. The partial (and mathematically void) links made here are more likely to point in the wrong direction than the right.THHuxley


    We have to start somewhere. I think it starts with understanding the photon, then the electron, then other stable particles. I think it was a big mistake to try to understand the proton by studying an ephemeral "zoo" of "resonances". It's like studying the pretty patterns of the firework explosions on New Year’s eve, thinking it’s going to teach you everything there is to know about gunpowder.

    Quote from Zephir_AWT

    What it so bizarre about it? One cannot observe something without exchanging some energy with observed object, one cannot exchange energy with subject without affecting it - the opposite is what the perpetuum mobile is called. This is what was originally opposed in this very thread. Not accidentally the minimal energy required for affecting the object and making an observation is just the energy of microwave noise field which surrounds all of us - everything smaller than that would disapper in this background noise.

    Hi Zephir. How are you keeping? Did I ever tell you about William Kingdon Clifford's space theory of matter? He said “I hold in fact:


    (1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.

    (2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.

    (3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.

    (4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject (possibly) to the law of continuity”.


    I think it's pretty much correct. You might like to call it aether wave theory. I prefer electromagnetic geometry myself.


    OK - so we now have some obviously false things to debunk.


    Mr. Alan himself just said that pilot wave is not complete description of reality - no matter whether he is correct or wrong, it would imply that pilot wave isn't equivalent to another, "more complete" interpretations. And they really aren't, that means that their labelling as interpretations is misnomer - at least partially .


    So if PW interpretation is physical - more than an interpretation - it must make some different prediction. That can be tested and eliminate it. I don't believe this - PW interpretation is too vague - but if it does bring it on! Otherwise this argument is false. CI interpretation may be physically non-equivalent in the sense that it is less good (there are some results that MWI gets correct which it cannot determine). That then just makes it incomplete and less good than the more complete MWI. Obviously to be rejected.


    If the MWI is correct then time evolution is always exactly unitary. The CI doesn't explain how we get to a non-unitary collapse, but it does assume that there exists such a thing. This implies that at least in principle there should be detectable effects. Systems that are well isolated from the environment should undergo a non-unitary time evolution at a rate that is faster than can be explained as being caused by decoherence by the residual interactions it still has with the environment.


    No reputable physicist sees vanilla CI as more than a convenience. And there are though experiments preserving coherence where an apparent collapse can be uncollapsed. Inasfar as we are able all experiments are consistent with unitary evolution (by far the simplest interpretation). So if your point is that CI is wrong I'd agree - it is not consistent with complex coherence models. But it remains a simple approximation for most systems. personally I've always hated it (because it is obviously badly defined - when does the collapse happen?) and that is true of nearly all physicists now. However, you can maybe add bells and whistles to when collapse happens (it happens only when there is no possibility of coherence between the observer and observed systems reestablishing the original state) that would keep it in play (as an interpretation) that is physically identical to unitary evolution.


    David Deutsch has proposed a thought experiment to illustrate that MWI is not experimentally equivalent to CI. Suppose an artificially intelligent experimenter is simulated by a quantum computer. It will measure the operator A = |0><0| - |1><1|. The qubit is initialized in the state |1/sqrt(2)[|0> + |1>]. Then the CI predicts that after the measurement the state of the qubit undergoes a non-unitary collapse to one of the two possible eigenstates of A, i.e. |0> or |1>. The MWI asserts that the state of the entire quantum computer splits into two branches corresponding to either of the possible outcomes.


    To decide who is right, the experimenter decides to let the computer perform the unitary time evolution corresponding to inverting the final state of the quantum computer (according to the MWI) to the initial state, but while keeping the record that a measurement has been performed. This transform to the modified initial state is still unitary and can therefore be implemented (all unitary transforms can be implemented using only the CNOT and single qubit rotations). Then it is easy to check that if the CI is correct that you don't get that desired modified initial state back and the difference between the two states if the qubit you end up with, can be easily detected by doing measurements on it.


    Right. Which is the type of complex experiment that vanilla CI obviously gets wrong. However a more complex CI version would claim that in this case the collapse has not yet happened because this is not a "real" observation. Pretty silly, but arguable. Anyway no sensible physicist advocates CI has a correct interpretation capable of dealing with such situations.


    Unitary evolution rules. Every observation done is explained by the simplest model - which is unitary evolution. Many people don't like the fact that it has all those unobservable (and never future observable) other worlds. Well, I strongly do not see unobservability if almost all the universe as a philosophical problem. We accept unobservability of parts of the universe anyway, for example stuff that crosses an event horizon. That is only a small part of teh universe. But why should how much is unobservable change the correctness of an interpretation.


    That does not mean that I'm happy with MWI. Like many, I think it is incomplete. And now we have strong indications of how it is incomplete. If space and time itself is created from quantum entanglement, then the way that MWI makes most of the universe unobservable has a much more fundamental interpretation.


    Incidentally - those other worlds are not in principle unobservable. If the decoherence caused by the observation could be undone you would again have access to the whole thing. And, in isolated small systems, we have experiments showing this works. It is just absolutely unpractical in bigger systems.


    The (very exact) analogy here is 2LoT. Heat going from colder to hotter is not impossible, just vanishingly unlikely. If an information theory based underlying "construct spacetime from QM" theory ends up working out we will see that this analogy is in fact an exact corresponsence. QM collapse is a result of entropic considerations because QM (and time itself) is based on entropy.


    It is brave and forward-looking, as well as intensely satisfying, to tray and find such a deeper explanation of space and time which rests on QM entanglement, and thus unifies GR and QM. Modern work has been moving in this direction for more than 10 years. It is profoundly different from the embedded in fixed spacetime mechanics that we naturally use to describe the world.


    So, when I look for something more predictive and more fundamental than QM, I look forward to a true theory that explains what is space and time in a way that also explains the quantum (as opposed to continuous) nature of the world, rather than back to some dynamical evolution on an arbitrary differentiable manifold.


    That is also why I see QFT and the idea that all forces are the result of virtual particle exchange as forward-looking even though not complete, and theories that try to remove virtual particles as the explanation of forces as regressive, rooted in a more easily intuitive but less physically precise past.


    THH

    We've never actually seen a W or a Z. Their existence was inferred from decay products. See the January 2003 physicsworld article Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z by Gary Taubes. Nobody has ever seen a quark either. Note this in the Wikpedia tau particle article: "They did not detect the tau directly, but rather discovered anomalous events". Muons are short-lived, lasting for circa two millionths of a second. So I think it's reasonable for an electron paper not to include the electron's interaction with the W and Z and other particles.


    The point is that SM predicts those decay product observations on the basis of underlying symmetries that explain other observed particles. Such validation is very powerful. The theory (that those symmetries imply particles) explains many diverse observations from a simple idea.


    If you have an alternative simple idea that explains some of those observations but not all then it is much much less useful. Also BTW less beautiful - beauty comes from simplicity predicting apparent complexity.


    Now, I'm sympathetic to novel formulations that explain particle physics, although as above unless they go in the direction of using VP exchange to expalin forces I think they are regressive. But, for example, I'd be happy with some different idea of what is a real (or virtual) particle. But, only if it includes (e.g. from it we can derive) all the simplicity and predictive goodness we get from SM:

    Virtual particles <==> forces

    symmetries <==> particles.


    That whole pantheon of particles looks complex until you see that it comes from a very simple set of symmetries. The symmetry explanation was truly predictive (not just retrospectively explanatory).


    THH

    • Official Post

    All you said can be summarized into: I love SM even with all its flaws.


    Sorry for the pun but you have to admit the flaws of SM at some point, we all know it has many merits, but clinging to those will not help advancing our understanding of matter.

    All you said can be summarized into: I love SM even with all its flaws.


    Sorry you cannot see the reason I love (the main part of) SM (and I don't rate the alternate meaning of the acronym so no probs)


    Sorry for the pun but you have to admit the flaws of SM at some point, we all know it has many merits, but clinging to those will not help advancing our understanding of matter.


    I just don't understand that, in current context. Its flaws are that it is clearly incomplete, and does not predict everything, nor say why it can't predict everything. And, it does not of itself cohere with GR. But it is the best we have and much more complete than any of the half-arsed ideas discussed here as competition.


    The coherence with GR looks like in process of being solved, and is very exciting


    The incompleteness remains, but may well be explained when we have nailed how GR and QM combine.


    I don't see me clinging to those flaws. If however you think there are other flaws I'm clinging to lets have them.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The point is that SM predicts those decay product observations on the basis of underlying symmetries that explain other observed particles. Such validation is very powerful. The theory (that those symmetries imply particles) explains many diverse observations from a simple idea.


    Can you give us a paper reference where any "fringe" SM model gives a prediction of the exact energy of Z, W from first principle not from other fudged masses energies???

    Quote from axil

    The Trouble with Many Worlds


    There is no trouble! There are only many troubled minds severely infected by 90 years fringe claims of physicists saying that QM is fundamental.


    QM has no physical/experimental ground as it is even not able to do the most basic thing = calculate the correct potential between proton and electron.


    Unluckily this "the correct potential between proton and electron" was true until the seventies, where we only did know about 5 digits of the Hydrogen ionization energy.


    Today its more off than on. Thus for me such talks are a sign of a pathological defect of people that believe in math instead in the experimental reality.


    To repeat it one more: QM is not fundamental if you believe that nature exists and what we measure is real.

    • Official Post

    What I meant is that you are willing to cling to the SM for its merits and therefore proclive to overlook its limitations. Same for QM. You call the competition “half arsed ideas”, but if you compare the total amount of resources devoted to research on SM and QM with the amount devoted to “the half arsed competition ideas” it seems the rate of advance per invested buck is much greater on the “half arsed ideas”.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    The point is that SM predicts those decay product observations on the basis of underlying symmetries that explain other observed particles. Such validation is very powerful. The theory (that those symmetries imply particles) explains many diverse observations from a simple idea.

    You really need to read Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z. Gary Taubes basically said Rubbia faked the discovery of the W and Z. It's true I'm afraid. When you understand the electron, you know why the electron and the positron move the way that they do. It isn't because they're throwing photons back and forth. Then you come to appreciate that Weinberg’s 1967 paper on a model of leptons is a) nothing of the sort and b) badly wrong. Weinberg started by saying “leptons interact only with photons". It simply isn't true. Electrons also interact with electrons, and with positrons and protons and neutrinos too. Don’t forget that Fermi’s interaction “posits four fermions directly interacting with one another”. In Weinberg’s model, they don’t. Something else you might like to look at is the peculiar notion of exchange forces part I and part II by Cathryn Carson. She says the exchange-particle idea worked its way into QED from the mid-1930s, even though Heisenberg used a neutron model that was later retracted.


    Quote from THuxleynew

    If you have an alternative simple idea that explains some of those observations but not all then it is much much less useful. Also BTW less beautiful - beauty comes from simplicity predicting apparent complexity.T

    Beauty is no substitute for understanding. It leads to dead-end ideas like supersymmetry, wherein people predict a selectron when they have no understanding whatsoever of what an electron is.


    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Now, I'm sympathetic to novel formulations that explain particle physics, although as above unless they go in the direction of using VP exchange to explaln forces I think they are regressive. But, for example, I'd be happy with some different idea of what is a real (or virtual) particle. But, only if it includes (e.g. from it we can derive) all the simplicity and predictive goodness we get from SM:

    Virtual particles <==> forces

    symmetries <==> particles.

    That whole pantheon of particles looks complex until you see that it comes from a very simple set of symmetries. The symmetry explanation was truly predictive (not just retrospectively explanatory).

    Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real. I'm afraid to say that anything that "explains" forces using particles that do not exist is pseudoscience. That whole pantheon of particles might look complex, but note that we have only a handful of stable particles: the photon, the neutrino, the electron, and the proton. Plus antiparticles. That symmetry "explanation" doesn't explain any of them. As such the Standard Model is just Smoke and Mirrors. For example, when you understand the electron, you understand why the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It isn't a measure of its interaction with some kind of cosmic treacle. So the Higgs mechanism is wrong. It's referred to as the toilet of the Standard Model because it was an ugly kludge. A short-range force demands massive gauge bosons, which means electroweak theory is not a gauge theory like electromagnetism is supposed to be. After touting the wonders of symmetry, Weinberg and co claimed the gauge bosons get their mass from a broken symmetry. Then they touted broken symmetry as a great virtue! Here's something else to look at. It's a plot of the nuclear force, plus a plot of neutron charge distribution. You know what that means? It means the nuclear force is electromagnetic. Check out Bernard Schaeffer's website: http://bernardschaeffer.canalblog.com/


    nuclearforceplot.pngNuclear force plot from Dux college HSC physics course, neutron charge distribution image by Dru Renner inverted by me

    Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real. I'm afraid to say that anything that "explains" forces using particles that do not exist is pseudoscience.


    By those realist standards particles are not real!


    It is like saying that QM is not real because an electron cannot be both a particle and a wave.


    Or that QFT is not real because fields are not quantum phenomena.


    And to say that virtual particles do not explain forces is just wrong. They do.


    Readable popularisation of the issues:

    https://www.scientificamerican…re-virtual-particles-rea/



    Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested.

    Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.

    But while the virtual particles are briefly part of our world they can interact with other particles, and that leads to a number of tests of the quantum-mechanical predictions about virtual particles. The first test was understood in the late 1940s. In a hydrogen atom an electron and a proton are bound together by photons (the quanta of the electromagnetic field). Every photon will spend some time as a virtual electron plus its antiparticle, the virtual positron, since this is allowed by quantum mechanics as described above. The hydrogen atom has two energy levels that coincidentally seem to have the same energy. But when the atom is in one of those levels it interacts differently with the virtual electron and positron than when it is in the other, so their energies are shifted a tiny bit because of those interactions. That shift was measured by Willis Lamb and the Lamb shift was born, for which a Nobel Prize was eventually awarded.


    However, I agree that virtual partcile is a bad (almost teminally confusing) name for the phenomena commonly called "virtual particles" so maybe most of the uninformed resistance to them is understandable:


    https://profmattstrassler.com/…-particles-what-are-they/


    The term “virtual particle” is an endlessly confusing and confused subject for the layperson, and even for the non-expert scientist. I have read many books for laypeople (yes, I was a layperson once myself, and I remember, at the age of 16, reading about this stuff) and all of them talk about virtual particles and not one of them has ever made any sense to me. So I am going to try a different approach in explaining it to you.

    The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle. A particle is a nice, regular ripple in a field, one that can travel smoothly and effortlessly through space, like a clear tone of a bell moving through the air. A “virtual particle”, generally, is a disturbance in a field that will never be found on its own, but instead is something that is caused by the presence of other particles, often of other fields.

    Analogy time (and a very close one mathematically); think about a child’s swing. If you give it a shove and let it go, it will swing back and forth with a time period that is always the same, no matter how hard was the initial shove you gave it. This is the natural motion of the swing. Now compare that regular, smooth, constant back-and-forth motion to what would happen if you started giving the swing a shove many times during each of its back and forth swings. Well, the swing would start jiggling around all over the place, in a very unnatural motion, and it would not swing smoothly at all. The poor child on the swing would be furious at you, as you’d be making his or her ride very uncomfortable. This unpleasant jiggling motion — this disturbance of the swing — is different from the swing’s natural and preferred back-and-forth regular motion just as a “virtual particle” disturbance is different from a real particle. If something makes a real particle, that particle can go off on its own across space. If something makes a disturbance, that disturbance will die away, or break apart, once its cause is gone. So it’s not like a particle at all, and I wish we didn’t call it that.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real. I'm afraid to say that anything that "explains" forces using particles that do not exist is pseudoscience.


    By those realist standards particles are not real!

    Not so. Photons are real. Electrons are real. Protons are real. Neutrons are real. Neutrinos are real. Virtual particles aren't real. They are virtual. They only exist in the mathematics of the model. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle, and magnets don't shine.


    Quote

    It is like saying that QM is not real because an electron cannot be both a particle and a wave.

    No it isn't. You would know this if you'd read Pascual Jordan’s resolution of the conundrum of the wave-particle duality of light by Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen. See page 47 where they quote Jordan: “Einstein drew the conclusion that the wave theory would necessarily have to be replaced or at least supplemented by the corpuscular picture. With our findings, however, the problem has taken a completely different turn. We see that it is not necessary after all to abandon or restrict the wave theory in favour of other models; instead it just comes down to reformulating the wave theory in quantum mechanics. The fluctuation effects, which prove the presence of corpuscular light quanta in the radiation field, then arise automatically as consequences of the wave theory. The old and famous problem [of] how one can understand waves and particles in radiation in a unified manner can thus in principle be considered as solved”. Pascual Jordan solved the issue of wave-particle duality in 1927. Particles are waves. That's why photon energy E=hc/λ. That's why we can refract and diffract electrons.


    Quote

    Or that QFT is not real because fields are not quantum phenomena.

    Quantum Field Theory is just a theory. An electromagnetic field is real. But scientific progress such as Maxwell's unification reduced the number of fields, by combining electricity and magnetism to give us the electromagnetic field. Unfortunately the Standard Model has gone the other way, and tries to tell us there are 25 fundamental fields. Even though it doesn't even tell us how pair production works.


    Quote

    And to say that virtual particles do not explain forces is just wrong. They do.

    No, they don't. It's a fairy tale. It's what's called "lies to children". Think about an electron and a positron in a magnetic field:


    bubblecern.jpgBubble chamber picture from CERN


    They don't go round in opposite circles because virtual photons are popping in and out of existence. They do this because each is a "dynamical spinor". Spin is real. The electron doesn't have a magnetic moment for nothing. It goes round in circles because It’s subject to Larmor precession. The spin “precesses counter-clockwise about the direction of the magnetic field”. The electron goes round in circles rather like a boomerang goes round in circles due to gyroscopic precession. See the MRI article by Allen D Elster: “two particles with positive and negative gyromagnetic ratios precess in opposite directions”. The positron goes round the other way because it has the opposite chirality. Think in terms of a left-handed boomerang.


    Quote

    Readable popularisation of the issues: https://www.scientificamerican…re-virtual-particles-rea/


    Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested...

    This article is the most appalling garbage. Virtual particles are merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics. Have a read of Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford's paper fine structure of the hydrogen by a microwave method. There's absolutely nothing in there about virtual particles. Gordon Kane is telling the most appalling popscience porkies here.


    Quote

    https://profmattstrassler.com/…-particles-what-are-they/

    The term “virtual particle” is an endlessly confusing and confused subject for the layperson, and even for the non-expert scientist. I have read many books for laypeople (yes, I was a layperson once myself, and I remember, at the age of 16, reading about this stuff) and all of them talk about virtual particles and not one of them has ever made any sense to me. So I am going to try a different approach in explaining it to you. The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle...

    Matt Strassler says a virtual particle is a disturbance in a field that is not a particle. That's better than what Gordon Kane said. But see this?


    "It turns out that since electrons carry electric charge, their very presence disturbs the electromagnetic field around them, and so electrons spend some of their time as a combination of two disturbances, one in in the electron field and one in the electromagnetic field. The disturbance in the electron field is not an electron particle, and the disturbance in the photon field is not a photon particle. However, the combination of the two is just such as to be a nice ripple, with a well-defined energy and momentum, and with an electron’s mass. This is sketchily illustrated in Figure 3".


    It's still a fairy tale. Because Matt Strassler doesn't understand what a photon is, or what an electron is.


    Quote

    JD. The two graphs you post above for "nuclear force" and neutron charge distribution do not remotely show that the strong force is electromagnetic: and indeed that is unevidenced.

    You're in denial. You do know that the Standard Model doesn't explain the nuclear force, don't you? Here's something I've written previously. You might like to follow the hyperlinks:


    In 1986 in Hideki Yukawa and the meson theory Laurie Brown said “today’s standard model has not been able to calculate ‘low-energy’ processes, such as meson-nucleon scattering, or the nuclear forces”. In 1999 Charlotte Elster said calculations started about 15 years ago and many groups have been involved, but all the models create either too little or no intermediate-range attraction. According to Riken in 2007 the short-range repulsion remains an open question. That’s when Frank Wilczek said this in Nature: “ironically from the perspective of QCD, the foundation of nuclear physics appear distinctly unsound”. In John Gowan’s 2012 paper strong force two expressions you can read that the exact origin of the strong force is not yet a completely settled matter. In Ruprecht Machleidt’s 2013 paper origin and properties of strong inter-nucleon interactions you can read that it’s been seventy years of desperate struggle. Machleidt advocates chiral effective field theory but the bottom line is that there hasn’t been much in the way of recent progress. That’s why the nuclear force is in the list of unsolved problems in physics.

    DF:


    It seems from your reply above that you do not understand QM, do not understand QFT. And therefore classify it as "not real". That is your priviledge, but it is a shame and excludes you from evaluating the last 50 years of physics. Can I ask have you actually learnt the math for QM and the QFT? All that linear algebra? Because without that I don't think you can fairly evaluate either.


    Some specifics below, but I'd guess we will need to agree to disagree.


    Not so. Photons are real. Electrons are real. Protons are real. Neutrons are real. Neutrinos are real. Virtual particles aren't real. They are virtual. They only exist in the mathematics of the model. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle, and magnets don't shine.

    "only exist in maths of the model". Sure, that is true of all reality as described by modern physics. What makes a QM wave looking like an photon more "real" than a QFT disturbance looking like a virtual photon? Both are math constructions with precise observable effects. Both are abstract.


    Particles are waves. That's why photon energy E=hc/λ. That's why we can refract and diffract electrons.


    Don't teach grandma to suck eggs? I'm sure most people here know that particle/wave duality is satisfactorily resolved with wave packets. QM means you don't have to choose. So, given you accept this, and we agree, why not accept disturbances in quantised fields as as virtual particles? Too modern for you? I realise QFT was not nearly as easy historically as QM (which itself was not that easy).


    This article is the most appalling garbage.


    Well it accords (as a popularisation) well with my (now 40 years old) understanding. And Matts better description is pretty precise. While I do not claim to be an expert, having studied this stuff so long ago, Gordan Kane can reasonably so claim, as can Matt Strassler. I don't accept proof by authority but I'd need more than "appalling garbage" and links to either outdated science, or outlying science from authors who have clearly never learnt the math to understand the theory you claim they are replacing, either because it did not yet exist in a fully coherent form (Lamb, Rutherford), or because (Schaeffer) they have never learnt it.


    I'm sympathetic with people who have fully understood modern QFT, and can solve problems in it, want something better and try to find it. There are a lot of those. But not your links from people who have not done that.


    They don't go round in opposite circles because virtual photons are popping in and out of existence. They do this because each is a "dynamical spinor". Spin is real. The electron doesn't have a magnetic moment for nothing.


    You are asserting one magical mathematical model over another (also magical, but emerging directly from theory that applies to many other physical things, and therefore more fundamental) model. Why? In what way is magnetic moment more real than a virtual photon?


    It's still a fairy tale. Because Matt Strassler doesn't understand what a photon is, or what an electron is.


    Look, that is a very strong claim about a prolific theoretical physicist who has published a lot of relevant papers. How many of his (peer reviewed) papers have you read, and how many have you succeeded in rebutting or adding to? With peer reviewed refs please.


    You're in denial. You do know that the Standard Model doesn't explain the nuclear force, don't you? Here's something I've written previously. You might like to follow the hyperlinks:

    In 1986 in Hideki Yukawa and the meson theory Laurie Brown said “today’s standard model has not been able to calculate ‘low-energy’ processes, such as meson-nucleon scattering, or the nuclear forces”. In 1999 Charlotte Elster said calculations started about 15 years ago and many groups have been involved, but all the models create either too little or no intermediate-range attraction. According to Riken in 2007 the short-range repulsion remains an open question. That’s when Frank Wilczek said this in Nature: “ironically from the perspective of QCD, the foundation of nuclear physics appear distinctly unsound”. In John Gowan’s 2012 paper strong force two expressions you can read that the exact origin of the strong force is not yet a completely settled matter. In Ruprecht Machleidt’s 2013 paper origin and properties of strong inter-nucleon interactions you can read that it’s been seventy years of desperate struggle. Machleidt advocates chiral effective field theory but the bottom line is that there hasn’t been much in the way of recent progress. That’s why the nuclear force is in the list of unsolved problems in physics.


    You are stuck in the past.


    I take (as popular account of strong force understanding as of 2 years ago John Butterworth (he wrote a book too)

    https://www.theguardian.com/sc…uclear-force-a-revelation


    and the relevant review: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05935 (published as Eur.Phys.J. C78 (2018) no.4, 321)


    Now, the maths here is complex. I'll accept the "it is rubbish" opinion from anyone who can do it (and has done so) - but not from those who have not. And I'll accept that it (the above review) is not nonsense, because


    (1) it gets through peer review in a major journal

    (2) It gets a lot of (peer reviewed major journal) citations https://inspirehep.net/search?…efersto%3Arecid%3A1631169


    That means a lot of people who have learnt and done calculations with the relevant theory have read it and not trashed it. (You can check the citations if wondering whether they mostly say it is nonsense).


    Now - I'd agree that strong interaction is "unsolved" in the sense that not all questions about it can be calculated. The calculations are unpleasant. But I'll not accept that it is "not explained". The model does explain it nicely, does allow calculations that are predictive. I'll not accept that "all the models create too little or no intermediate range attraction".


    Philosophically - I'd also not accept that forever unpleasant calculations make a theory wrong or even incomplete, though equally I'd always hope for better calculation methods in the future.


    I'd accept Machleidt17 (as a personal but not unreasonable view) but not your summary of his conclusions:


    Thus, chiral EFT may ultimately suffer the same fate as meson theory. As
    explained in Sections 1 and 2, meson theory was originally (Phase I) designed to be
    a quantum field theory, but later (Phase II) had to be demoted to the level of a model
    (a very successful model, though). During the current Phase III, the main selling
    point has been that chiral EFT is a theory and not just a model and, therefore, its
    dogmatic use has been pushed. However, in analogy to what historically happened
    to meson theory, during the next phase (namely, Phase IV), we may have to resign
    ourselves to chiral EFT based models (that may potentially have great success).
    The history of nuclear forces clearly shows a pattern of 30-year phases. Whether
    these cycles will go on forever or whether Phase IV will be the last one, we will
    know Anno Domini 2050.


    And I'd agree that QCD is work in progress - partly because so computationally complex, it makes working out what is true slower.

    A decent forward-looking paragraph (with broader context) from Laura Marcucci


    Nuclear force between nucleons can be seen as a residual force resulting from the constituents of the nucleons, i.e., the quarks. How this force is connected with QCD has been an intense field of research since many decades. Thanks to lattice QCD and to the advent of chiral effective field theory (for recent reviews see [2, 3]), we are in the process of building nuclear interaction on the strong basis of QCD. Some issues however remain unsolved and definitely constitute grand challenges for NP: while the nucleon-nucleon interaction is nowadays quite well under control, the same cannot be said for the three-nucleon force, for which at the moment exist far less sophisticated models. This reflect on some long-standing discrepancies between theory and experiment in few-body observables, as the well known “Ay puzzle” (see [4] and references therein). The solution of this puzzle is a grand challenge for NP. The situation is even worse for the hyperon-nucleon and hyperon-hyperon interactions, for which lot of work still needs to be done. This is ultimately related to the “hyperon-puzzle” in neutron stars [5], which will be discussed below.

    One thing I don't accept is that systems like nuclei which are known to be highly complex many-body systems should (in a final GUT) necessarily have simply calculable properties. In fact I'd say we know enough to see why the known interactions (whether you use a quark model or something equivalent) are likely to be difficult to calculate. That does not (to me) seem a defect of the model.


    I fully expect something deeper than the SM to emerge from a GR / QFT unification that explains spacetime. I don't expect that such will make calculations of complex many-body systems in QCD any easier. Will we end up with a much easier way of calculating this stuff? Open question. I guess the amplitudehedron story gives us some hope.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real.


    That's the small part of THH post's that makes sense.


    The problem is a semantic one. Particles originally and for all time where tiny items we can see. As English is a non constructive language and has no mechanism to create new terms for new findings ( as German can), the use of the term particle for virtual mass like forces/fields is understandable. In SO(4) physics we always see virtual charge - without having any mass - that is coupling with orbits (source currents). I can live which such terminology as it helps engineers to form a mind picture of what happens behind the scene.



    Quote from THHuxleynew

    It seems from your reply above that you do not understand QM, do not understand QFT. And therefore classify it as "not real". That is your priviledge, but it is a shame and excludes you from evaluating the last 50 years of physics.


    The last 50 years of physics only brought an exponentiation of madness built on outraging nonsense. Nobels (e.g). Hicks , Quarks..) & breakthrough awards (super gravity) have been (just) devotes to complete nonsensical models.


    THH' s reason is only based on QM being wrong ... QM is an engineering model an as a such can be adequate or inaccurate but not wrong. Using QM/QED for dense mater modeling is not only wrong it's outraging nonsense as the internal magnetism that is totally dominating on a small scale is just not in the model.


    Compare it to the cloths of the kings allegory...

    Except this paper is not a review. Here is a review: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.0492


    Not good that cross sections calculated by perturbative QCD change so much from LO to NLO to NNLO and now with N3LO corrections. This does not give much credence to the underlying model. Furthermore, this only applies to high-energy physics, because perturbation theory and with it the concept of force-mediating particles fail in low-energy QCD, bound states, solitons, etc...

    Quote

    if PW interpretation is physical - more than an interpretation - it must make some different prediction. That can be tested and eliminate it.


    It's actually very simple with using of double experiment - see here.


    Quote

    Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested...


    It all depends on definition of reality and dimensionality of space-time. For example, at the water surface the density fluctuation formed by Brownian noise are observable by underwater waves, whereas they're still unobservable by surface transverse waves. Analogously in dense aether model (which compares 4D space-time to 3D water surface gradient) the virtual particles of vacuum will not be observable with transverse waves of light but they will refract scalar waves and also neutrinos (which are considered a solitons of scalar waves, i.e. supersymmetric analogy of photons in dense aether model). For example solar neutrinos are focused by sunspots, making solar corona hotter above them.

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