Dreaming in Geneva - FQXi essay

The theme for this year's FQXi contest topic is "Questioning the Foundations: Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions are Wrong?". I had some difficulty to start with this topic (I didn't seem to be the only one, see Ajit Jadhav's blog here and there). I had a lot of things to say about what has gone wrong with physics, which assumptions had to be reconsidered. So, since the opening of the contest, I regularly put some ideas in a draft, being confident that I would be able to arrange them into a coherent thesis for the essay. However by the 20th of August (ten days before closing), I still didn't know how I could write them together into an essay without being suspected of "trotting out my pet theory" (see warning in the Evaluation Criteria).

My "pet theory" is simple: the fundamental entity in physics is "THE quantum particle" which you can represent as an arrow (a vector, a ket). From the mechanical interactions between such rod-like particles, you may deduce all of physics, provided that you assume some complementary parameters (such as the velocity at which two particles fly one from another = c, the length of the rod = Bohr diameter of hydrogen). No mass, no force, no charge, etc. Just paths of rotating arrows that interact with each other through contact (collision). This is the way I reason about photons, electrons, quarks, fields, waves, etc. But I can't reasonably write it that way in an essay. I would need to recall a lot of history of science. So I chose to bring up some ideas that have emerged in history of science that we could reconsider, not necessarily in the same way, but gaining insight with hindsight.

Also I prefer to avoid abstract mathematics when talking physics. Mathematics is just a language, very convenient though, but really just a language that can hinder us in our intuitive understanding. Instead of math, scientists could as well use words, fantasy, dreams, pictures, poems maybe. It is an art and sometimes it is necessary to change the expression of this art. I hope you'll enjoy my dreaming in Geneva.

Second video sequence: Schrödinger equation

I just uploaded the second Common Sense Quantum Physics video sequence on youtube, presenting how the Schrödinger equation may be applied to ordinary macroscopic arrows. I have personnally had some difficulties to grasp the physical meaning of the evolution equations of QM when I studied it back in the eighties. I wish someone had tought me QM this way, so I hope it'll help some students.

Why 'Common Sense' Quantum Physics?

Quantum Physics is generally presented as a weird, non intuitive field of Physics. The domain of application is however that of the simplest systems: discrete particles evolving in a carefully controlled environment. Such systems therefore obey the most fundamental laws of physics. And who says "fundamental" says: simple, intuitive, common sense, natural... My conviction is that quantum laws are the simplest way to express how nature behaves. Or said otherwise: quantum physics is intuitive, with respect to classical physics that is artificially constructed. In order to see this, we must however approach Quantum Physics in a perspective that remains unexplored. Rather than to try to link it to classical and relativistic physics, we ought to take a more direct way.

I love the way Feynman presents Quantum Physics. In his renowned public lecture QED: The Stange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), he says: You will have to brace yourselves for this - not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper - that’s all! That's the essence of Quantum Physics: arrows. Mathematicians call arrows vectors, and there are very advanced, abstract ways to describe operations on such objects. But the mathematical artillery must not hide the fact that physically, we are handling with very simple objects: objects that are alike arrows, or rods, or needles, or ballpens, or baseball bats.

A child knows intuitively how such objects behave. Tintin's cartoon "Ottocar's scepter" shows a comic situation, in which the clue consists in correctly inferring how such an object could pass through a grid. In order to make sense of Quantum Physics, we'll have to brace ourselves for this: all we do is draw little arrows. So how could arrows help us to grasp the essence of Quantum Physics? The first thing is maybe to re-read Feynman's QED, or just visioning its 4 QED public lectures: http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8. Than just think about it.

There is not simpler a particle than a photon (apart maybe of a neutrino which is experimentally equivalent to a photon with zero frequency):

• it has no inertia, its departing velocity with respect to the emitter is always the same (provided it does not find obstacles on its way),
• it has a very simple polarization, when correctly oriented, it passes through a wire grid,
• when constrained between two limits, its frequency may take only discrete values,
• many photons with the same polarization may be beamed together,
• in the quantum ocean of other quantum particles (essentially other photons or neutrinos), one photon creates and interacts with (we say interfers with) the wave it generates in that ocean (physicists speak of a field).

Such a particle may be represented by a rotating arrow whose rotational plane has a constant orientation between two obstacles.

This common sense way of interpreting Quantum Mechanics is explored at Wikiversity/Making_Sense_of_Quantum_Mechanics.