Ben6993 wrote:Hi Joy
I have added your webpage to my physics favourites; second on the list behind Fred's site.
Quoting from your website:
Abraham Pais, in his classic biography of Einstein: `Subtle is the Lord…’ [pp 460]:
" (3) Instead—and this was Einstein’s main point—one should start all over again, as it were, and endeavor to obtain the quantum theory as a by-product of a general relativistic theory or a generalization thereof."
What else is wrong with quantum theory besides entanglement?
I have some points where I think quantum theory is wrong. One of them crops up in a popular book about Feynman:
Surely, you are joking Mr Feynman ... At a time late in life, Feynman's father asks Feynman "does the photon exist before it is emitted?" To which the answer is, of course, no.
In my preon model, the photon does not exist before emission but the preons it contains did exist prior as preons are neither created nor destroyed in interactions. The electron interacts with a small (or even very small) higgs family member and the photon is emitted. Two particles in and two out. In this model, weak isospin is conserved. The higgs particle has weak isospin as its only eigenvalue (+ and - 0.5). So, in QM,weak isospin is not conserved during photon emission [one in and two out model] , but in my model weak isospin is conserved during photon emission because preons are conserved in all interactions, and it is two in and two out, and the higgslet provides the missing weak isospin. Preons are rearranged in particle interactions comparably to atoms being rearranged in chemical reactions of molecules.
Thank you, Ben.
I wouldn't say there is something "wrong" with quantum theory. Nor did Einstein think there was something wrong with quantum theory. I also wouldn't say that quantum entanglement is somehow "wrong." That would be missing the point Einstein stressed most of his life. Quantum theory and quantum entanglement make all the right predictions as far as we know. Although there is the so-called "cosmological constant problem" which highlights the fact that predictions based on the standard theory of quantum vacuum are off by some 120 orders of magnitude!!! But that was not known in Einstein's time and he had never taken any serious interest in quantum field theory in the first place. His concerns were at a much deeper level. Just because a given theory makes all the right predictions within the domain of its applicability does not mean that the theory provides the correct description of nature. Take, for example, Newton's theory of gravity. Even today there is absolutely nothing wrong with Newton's theory of gravity within its domain of applicability. And this fact was verified for nearly 300 years before Einstein proposed its subtle generalization in his own theory of gravity. And today, 100 years later, we have verified one of its dramatic predictions -- namely, that of the gravitational waves. So if Einstein had just accepted the enormously successful and accurate theory of Newton, then we would have never known about the gravitational waves, let alone had looked for them, spending over a billion dollars. So why did Einstein seek to generalize Newton's theory of gravity if not for empirical reasons? Well, mainly because of conceptual reasons, since empirically there was not much to go on. To be sure, there were some observational anomalies, like in the perihelion precession of Mercury, but conceptual problems with Newton's theory were much more serious, and those were the prime concerns of Einstein. To begin with Newton's theory is
non-local, and that was reason enough for Einstein to reject it. Similarly, quantum theory is
non-local, as discovered by Einstein and EPR in 1935, and that was reason enough for Einstein to reject it, despite its extraordinary empirical success. For Einstein quantum theory simply cannot be the correct description of nature, because it is
non-local. So what about the specific issues you raise, such as about the existence of photon before emission etc.? Well, we cannot be sure what the right answer is until we find the right theory. That is why it is so important to keep an open mind about quantum theory and not fall into the trap of thinking too quantum mechanically.
