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There Is No Quantum Theory!
Posted on Tuesday, April 26, 2005 @ 22:09:31 UTC by vlad

Science In the yahoo HSG group John E. Barchak writes: Many people suffer from the illusion that somehow the energy levels of hydrogen magically pop out of Schroedinger's equation and that quantum theory actually predicts those levels. Actually, there is no Quantum Theory. What is called a "theory" is really an empirical structure that could be replaced by a set of empirical curve fitting algorithms and empirical hamiltonians. It makes no predictions at all. All of the information contained in Schroedinger's equation was put there by Schroedinger and Hermann Weyl.

Much of the information for hydrogen was empirical from the Lymann, Balmer, Paschen, Brackett, and Pfund spectrum series. DeBroglie provided the motivation for Schroedinger's equation (DeBroglie felt that matter could be modeled as waves), but he had no direct involvement in the development of the wave equation. It was Hermann Weyl who assisted Schroedinger in the development of the wave equation so that the stable states of the hydrogen atom could be derived from it. Schroedinger's equation was designed to give the "right" answers. It is entirely empirical.

The following passage is from page 28 of "The Infamous Boundary" by David Wick (Copernicus 1996):

"Weyl was expert in many topics in mathematical physics, including the non-Euclidian geometry exploited by Einstein a decade before to construct a new theory of gravity. (In Space, Time, Matter (1918), the book young Heisenberg claimed to have read, Weyl had advanced his own version of relativity, including an attempt to unify gravity with electromagnetism that had drawn criticism from Einstein.) Most importantly from Schrodinger's point of view, Weyl knew the theory of "proper vibrations" in continuous media. This well developed mathematical discipline treated standing waves in a variety of situations, including water in a lake, air in an organ pipe, and strings on a guitar. Schrodinger hoped it would apply to the atom as well. With Weyl's help, he succeeded in deriving Bohr's stable states of the hydrogen atom, without any recourse to the classical picture of the electron as a point particle."

It was Born who put the point particle back in (but in a stochastic manner). Schrodinger regretted the reintroduction of the point particle until his last days.

The following is an excerpt from Ed Jaynes "Scattering of Light by Free Electrons as a Test of Quantum Theory": "Is Quantum Theory a System of Epicycles? Today, Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) have great pragmatic success -- small wonder, since they were created, like epicycles, by empirical trial-and-error guided by just that requirement. For example, when we advanced from the hydrogen atom to the helium atom, no theoretical principle told us whether we should represent the two electrons by two wave functions in ordinary 3-d space, or one wave function in a 6-d configuration space; only trial- and-error showed which choice leads to the right answers.

Then to account for the effects now called 'electron spin', no theoretical principle told Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck how this should be incorporated into the mathematics. The expedient that finally gave the right answers depended on Pauli's knowing about the two-valued representations of the rotation group, discovered by Cartan in 1913.

In advancing to QED, no theoretical principle told Dirac that electromagnetic field modes should be quantized like material harmonic oscillators; and for reasons to be explained here by Asim Barut, we think that it is still an open question whether the right choice was made. It leads to many right answers but also some horrendously wrong ones that theorists simply ignore; but it is now known that virtually all the right answers could have been found without, while some some of the wrong ones were *caused by*, field quantization.

Because of their empirical origins, QM and QED are not physical theories at all. In contrast, Newtonian celestial mechanics, Relativity, and Mendelian genetics are physical theories, because their mathematics was developed by reasoning out the consequences of clearly stated physical principles which constrained the possibilities. To this day we have no constraining principle from which one can deduce the mathematics of QM and QED; in every new situation we must appeal once again to empirical evidence to tell us how we must choose our mathematics in order to get the right answers.

In other words, the mathematical system of present quantum theory is, like that of epicycles, unconstrained by any physical principles. Those who have not perceived this have pointed to its empirical success to justify a claim that all that all phenomena must be described in terms of Hilbert spaces, energy levels, etc. This claim (and the gratuitous addition that it must be interpreted physically in a particular manner) have captured the minds of physicists for over sixty years. And for those same sixty years, all efforts to get at the nonlinear 'chromosomes and DNA' underlying that linear mathematics have been deprecated and opposed by those practical men who, being concerned only with phenomenology, find in the present formalism all they need.

But is not this system of mathematics also flexible enough to accomodate any phenomenology, whatever it might be? Others have raised this question seriously in connection with the BCS theory of superconductivity. We have all been taught that it is a marvelous success of quantum theory, accounting for persistant currents, Meissner effect, isotope effect, Josephson effect, etc. Yet on examination one realizes that the model Hamiltonian is phenomenological, chosen not from first principles but by trial-and- error so as to agree with just those experiments.

Then in what sense can one claim that the BCS theory gives a *physical explanation* of superconductivity? Surely, if the Meissner effect did not exist, a different phenomenological model would have been invented, that does not predict it; one could have claimed just as great a success for quantum theory whatever the phenomenology to be explained.

This situation is not limited to superconductivity; in magnetic resonance, whatever the observed spectrum, one has been able to invent a phenomenological spin-Hamiltonian that "accounts" for it. In high-energy physics one observes a few facts and considers it a big advance - and great new triumph for quantum theory - when it is always possible to invent a model conforming to QM that "accounts" for them. The 'technology' of QM, like that of epicycles, has run far ahead of real understanding.

This is the grounds for our suggestion (Jaynes, 1989) that present QM is only an empty mathematical shell in which a future physical theory may, perhaps, be built. But however that may be, the point we want to stress is that the success - however great - of an empirically developed set of rules gives us no reason to believe in any particular physical interpretation of them. No physical principles went into them.

Contrast this with the logical status of a real physical theory; the success of Newtonian celestial mechanics does give us a valid reason for believing in the restricting inverse-square law, from which it was deduced; the success of relativity theory gives us an excellent reason for believing in the principle of relativity, from which it was deduced. Theories need not refer specifically to physics: the success of economic predictions made from the restricting law of supply and demand gives us a valid reason for believing in that law."

Jaynes, E. T. (1989), "Clearing up Mysteries: The Original Goal", in
*Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods*, J. Skilling, Editor, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland, pp. 1-27.

"Scattering of Light by Free Electrons as a Test of Quantum Theory" is found at: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/scattering.by.free.pdf

All the best
John B.

 
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"There Is No Quantum Theory!" | Login/Create an Account | 4 comments | Search Discussion
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Re: There Is No Quantum Theory! (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Thursday, April 28, 2005 @ 06:24:05 UTC
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A more interesting insight into the nature of hydrogen energy levels can be found in "Physical Review D Volume 35,#10, Ground State of Hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation-determined state" by H.E. Putoff.

Read it and become enlightened. Yes, there is no Quantum Theory, just a set of accounting rules calling itself Quantum Theory. Since its inception, Quantum Theory has always obscured the true nature of the mechanism that keeps an electron in orbit around a nucleus.



Re: There Is No Quantum Theory! (Score: 1)
by guido on Wednesday, May 04, 2005 @ 21:12:51 UTC
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The webpage www.esotericscience.com/AtomsQM.aspx discusses an interesting similarity between the QM wave equation and the Navier-Stokes fluid dynamic equations for a compressible viscous fluid. A fluid that could be equated to an aether like substance.



Re: There Is No Quantum Theory! (Score: 1)
by Matt_Mastin on Monday, May 16, 2005 @ 14:23:59 UTC
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Now, I know I am just a lowly physics undergrad, but I do have a few comments related to this post:

First of all, I essentially agree with the statement that Quantum Theory is not on the same theoretical level as Relativity... but not much is. Even the formalism of Maxwell's equations, one of the most beautiful theories in all of physics cannot touch the philisophical implications of relativity. Eistein wasn't trying to explain physical phenomenon, he was trying to understand how we observe the universe. The fact that Einstein's ideas led to a theory of gravity is one of the most amazing achievements in physics. But, can we say that because we believe in the principle of relativity that gravity really is the "bending of space?" In my opinion NO!! This might be the case, but how do we "prove" it? Geometry provides a great framework for relativity, but when it comes down to it, differential geometry is an abstract construct that happens to fit into general relativity... or maybe the otherway around. Even Einstein wasn't thinking about geometry when he wrote his first papers on relativity. And what about the fact that even Schwartzchild geometry cannot provide an accurate picture of space-time. Even general relativity has an aspect of locality to it... could a theory that accurately describes reality be so limited? True, maybe there is a new metric around the corner that will get rid of this issue, but the truth is that we just don't know!

One of the biggest problems I am having as a student of physics is trying to figure out what the physical implications of a theory actually are. Again consider Maxwell's equations, I realize that vector calculus wasn't around when Maxwell was doing his work, but it provides the framework of his theory as we understand it today. Calculus is a great tool, but it has one fatal flaw... it assumes continuity. Any physicist will tell you that charge is quantized, yet we all turn around and build charge distributions using Riemann Integrals! And what's worse? We do it using point charges! What does this say for the physical implications of classical emag? To me it says that you shouldn't consider the physical implications of classical emag. You should simply restrict yourself to appreciating it for what it was meant to do... calculate stuff! Ether doesn't exist (we don't think), light seems to not act like a wave all the time... these contradict "physical implications" of classical emag... but we don't argue its validity as a theory.

So, back to Quantum... I don't think anyone could argue against the fact that Quantum Mechanics is the most debated area of physics. Here we are almost one hundred years after its conception and we are still arguing about what it really tells us about reality. Maxwell died believing that his equations described mechanical processes; Schrodinger died denying that his waves had anything to do with probability. I think we should appreciate what Quantum Mechanics has done for us... given us the most accurate predictive power in all of physics, changed the way we view the world around us, given us all this great oppurtunity for debate, and countless other wonders...

I guess my point is that I am very slow to say that any of our theories actually give us insight into how reality actually works. True, some "theories" are based on properties that we believe reality to posses (such as the principle of relativity, but even here it could be argued that this principle is a result of our inability to observe reality and not an actual property of reality), but does this imply that they "accurately" describe nature?

It all comes down to Godel, we cannot completely describe nature, there will always be boundaries to our theories.... that is what gives them meaning.

Live Long and Lucky,

Matt Mastin



 

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