The year is 2016 AD. Science is entirely occupied by the Quantum Magicians. Well, not entirely... One small group of indomitable Aetherists still holds out against Quantum Madness. And life is not easy for the magicians' legionairies who garrison the fortified camps of Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Quantum Entanglement and Virtual Fields...
By Arend Lammertink, MScEE, October 2016.
Introduction
Quantum Magic is a currently popular cult, which is involved in what could be called modern alchemy. It's proponents are often brilliant men and women, yet they actually and seriously believe that the following (obviously wrong) statements are true:
- particles can exist at two places at the same time;
- two particles at different locations can be magically "entangled", requiring "spooky action at a distance", on it's turn requiring infinite forces propagating at an infinite speed;
- the mere act of "observing" is enough to influence the result of a measurement;
- "virtual", by definition "imaginary" or "non-existing", "fields" and "particles" make perfectly sense in explaining the workings of the Universe.
Needless to say, hardly any arguments are to be found to distinguish Quantum Magic from Pseudoscience, the fruitless art of trying to explain the workings of the Universe without the use of testable proposals which "make possible the verification by experiment".
Pseudoscience
In the mid-20th century, Karl Popper put forth the criterion of falsifiability to distinguish science from nonscience. Falsifiability means a result can be disproved. For example, a statement such as "God created the universe" may be true or false, but no tests can be devised that could prove it either way; it simply lies outside the reach of science. Popper used astrology and psychoanalysis as examples of pseudoscience and Einstein's theory of relativity as an example of science.
All right, we can live with that. Einstein's relativity theory falls within the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. All one needs to do is measure the propagation of a signal which travels faster than light, and we're done. Piece of cake. Charles Wheatstone already did so in 1834 with virtually nothing but Leyden Yars and some long wires. And we got all kinds of experiments with "fast light", which show that propagation speeds (much) faster than the speed of light have been measured, so no problem there.
The good news is that we can still refer to Albert Einstein as one of the latest of the great scientists on this planet, before the pseudo-scientists came in and gotten us into the mess we got today, even though his theory has actually been falsified by the above experimental data. Heck, even GPS contradicts relativity according to Ron Hatch, an expert on GPS:
GPS evidence reveals logical faults in standard relativistic theory and points toward the true underlying physics.
That is what science is all about. It's about the quest for answers in order to make this world a better place. "Question everything" was Albert's motto, and that is what distinguishes a scientist from a pseudo-scientist. So, let's give Einstein a break. It wasn't his fault Lorentz came up with his freaky mathematical transform that put uncle Albert on the wrong foot.
But what about "virtual particles", "dark matter", "weak nuclear forces", "strong nuclear forces" and even "10 to 26-dimensional string theories"?
- What tests can be devised that can prove or disprove the existence of, by definition non existing, "virtual particles"?
- What tests can be devised that can prove or disprove the existence of "dark matter", which is called "dark" because we have no way to measure any trace of it?
- What tests can be devised that can prove or disprove the existence of either "strong" or "weak" nuclear forces, knowing that particles are some kind of electro-magnetic phenomenon (as implied by wave-particle duality) and are therefore governed by electromagnetic forces?
- What tests can be devised that can prove or disprove the existence of a physical multi-dimensional hyper-space, while we live in a 3D Universe?
It is clear that all these "things", "forces", "fields" and what have you, which have been invented for the single reason of filling up the gaping holes in the current "main-stream" theories, are not testable and therefore do not fall within the realm of science. They are a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense, to paraphrase Tesla:
The theory of relativity he described as "a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense."
"The theory, "he said, "wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved."
Now what?
While I posted this article just for the fun of using the argument that aether science is typically considered "pseudoscientific crackpottery" against the Quantum Magicians for a change, there is some seriousness here, too.
Actually, there is something very wrong with our current physics and aether theory deserves a serious consideration, because it can actually be shown to solve the problems caused by Maxwell's hole in a simple, elegant and straightforward application of textbook fluid dynamic vector theory.
From that point of view, it's all the more #funny that Quantum Magicians actually believe the mentioned statements are true!
What you say is pure non-sense.
Quantum mechanics is an amazingly efficient theory for describing all data from the microscopic world so far. No matter you like it or not, it works. Thousands of results are there to prove it. Which also means it is falsifiable, testable, etc... and your claims about quantum mechanics being a pseudoscience and not testable are just wrong and a proof you do not understand it.
And the same holds for quantum field theory, the Standard Model of particle physics or cosmology, You can call them as you want, but they make predictions in agreement with a plethora of data. This is why they are so well considered today.
In short: your claims about the current paradigm being not testable is just ridiculous. Data is there! You seem to be the only one who does not want to see it.
It is good to be open-minded and to listen for new ideas. But if you want to replace the current paradigm, you ned to come with something that does as good with respect to data. This is not the case of your 'theory'. It is wrong from line 1. Let me recall that wave and matter are dual, as stated by quantum mechanics. And the wave associated with matter has nothing to do with electromagnetism. Data is there to prove it.
Finally, in my career I met several crackpots. They all have something in common. They all claim that modern science is a pseudoscience, that they are the only ones who know what is real science, but that unfortuantely no one wants to listen to them... Your article definitely sorts you in this category... I do not even have to do it myself. Thanks for sparing me this task :)
Modern physics may not be the ultimate theory (which we do not know yet), but in the meantime, it works extremely well to describe all data. Try to do as good. If it does not work (and I can guarantee your "theory" won't work), it is maybe the time to get some critical sense and move on with other things.
You mean data like Aspect's experiment supposedly proving "entanglement"?
Have you seen that?
It actually says that about 5 * 10^7 photon pairs are emitted per second by the source. That's a lot. Then it says that single rates are over 10^4/sec and that dark rates are about 10^2/s and that the accidental rate is about 10/s. Finally, actual rates are in the order of 0-40/s.
Let's say for the sake of the argument that the "actual rate" is about 100/s. That means that 100 - (100/5e7 * 100) = 99,9998% of the supposedly generated pairs are somehow not labeled as "actual".
I don't know, but it seems to me that if you throw away that much of your data points because they don't fit with the desired results that you are doing something wrong.
Beside that, there's no consideration whatsoever about how the interaction between "photons" and their polarizer takes place. It's just assumed to be "random", so what you get is a situation whereby you don't have any idea what you're measuring and what it actually means.
In other words: garbage in, garbage out and nothing proven whatsoever.
All data does not mean Aspect's experiment only. All data... means all data from the microscopic world. From the evidence for weak bosons or the gluons, to cosmological precision data, via neutrino physics, etc... Good luck to describe all of this with electromagnetism only.
Of course, if you consider only selected pieces from data, anything becomes possible. But this is not scientific...
No reasearch to prove it?
And what do you think Large Hadron Collider, Tevatron or Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have been doing?
You are science confusionist. Put you tinfoil hat.
You can find your answer just above. They are smashing particles together with ever increasing speed and energy, only to create interference c.q. heterodyning of the electromagnetic phenomena involved, which of course results in the differentials coming to the forefront.
And then they catalog these differentials, give them a name, and confuse themselves therewith.
what they have been doing is like Harrison Ford in 'Blade Runner', zooming in to a few pixels; 'enhance', and reveal detailed data.
-over and over again.
@lamare, "Question Everything" indeed! Please keep on raising the questions, please keep encouraging people out of their complacency... ;)
Thank you for raising these excellent questions. I'm disappointed to be "under the weather" today, but when I'm feeling better I hope to read all your links on "fast light." We could really use real-time communication with spacecraft on the Moon and on Mars...