Does light vibrate in a physical direction? In physical realism, it must do so because space gives all possible directions. Sound is a longitudinal wave that vibrates air molecules in its travel direction, so there is no sound in empty space because there are no air molecules there. In contrast, light travels in the vacuum of space or we couldn’t see the stars at night.

It is a transverse wave, that vibrates at right angles to its line of travel but that can’t be a physical direction because space is isotropic so “up” from one view is “down” from another. Simply put, physical space has no “free” direction for positive-negative electromagnetic values to vibrate into so physical realism can’t explain how light vibrates at all.

Space as a surface however lets light move on space as waves move on a lake except this surface has three dimensions not two. Light then is a transverse quantum wave vibrating into a plane beyond our space, just as complex number theory describes, which this makes us 3D “Flatlanders”.

In Abbot’s story, the Flatlanders were beings who lived their lives on a 2D surface (Abbott, 1884). Everything they did happened in two dimensions not three, so they could see a circle say but could only imagine a sphere as expanding and contracting circles passing through their reality.

Now imagine a point moving on their flat land that sets values in a transverse circle at right angles to their space (Figure 3.8a). Flatlanders could only conceive of these values existing in a complex plane that didn’t exist for them, as we do for light. As the point moves, it defines a polarization plane in their space (Figure 3.8b), again as we have for light. To explain this, they might postulate an “unreal”, to them, sine wave amplitude (Figure 3.8c), just as we do for electromagnetism.

That light is a transverse rotation outside space suggests that complex numbers explain electromagnetism because light really is rotating outside space, so:

“In quantum mechanics there really are complex numbers, and the wave function really is a complex-valued function of space-time.” (Lederman & Hill, 2004) p346

Complex numbers describe a rotation into a dimension outside our space (Figure 3.9) that we call imaginary because it doesn’t exist in our space, just as Flatlanders might call a third dimension that doesn’t exist in their space imaginary. But that a dimension doesn’t exist in our space doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist at all if, like Abbot’s Flatland, our 3D space is contained within a higher dimensional space.

If our three-dimensional space exists within a quantum network with four degrees of freedom, light can vibrate into a dimension outside space. In simple terms, physical space is a surface within a four-dimensional quantum space. If our bodies exist as quantum waves that vibrate into a quantum space, we can’t enter that space any more than a water wave can leave the pond surface it vibrates on. It follows that we are three dimensional Flatlanders.

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Maxwell’s equations describe a photon as a wave in an electromagnetic field that sets imaginary values outside our space. If this wave vibrates slowly, we get radio waves, faster vibrations are visible light and very fast vibrations are x-rays or gamma rays (Figure 3.5). Visible light is the part of the spectrum that vibrates about a million-billion times a second, gamma rays are a billion times faster while radio waves vibrate just a few times a second. For simplicity, from now on the term “light” refers to any electromagnetic wave frequency.

In Newton’s optics, a light ray moves on an axis that can contain many photons polarized in different ways. Modern filters can polarize a ray one way and lasers can even produce a pulse of light of one frequency in one polarization plane on one axis, which is one photon.

When such techniques produce rays of polarized light that are out-of-phase, the crests of one match the troughs of the other. The result is two rays that are separately visible but combine to give darkness, as the out-of-phase photons cancel each other just as out-of-phase waves do. This light + light = darkness confirms that light really is a wave as particles can’t do this. Note that flashlight beams can’t do this because they aren’t polarized.

We also know the type of wave. Light is a sine wave that in mathematics maps to an extended circle (Figure 3.6), so a pointer turning in a circle like a clock hand can describe a sine wave, as shown in Figure 3.7.

Wave theory describes a water wave as a sine wave caused by the forces of gravity and elasticity acting at right angles to the water surface. When the wave arrives, a surface water molecule is pushed say up until gravity pulls it back down, then the water elasticity pushes it back up, etc. The wave just moves water molecules up and down so corks just bob up and down as a wave passes. What travels on the surface is a transverse vibration not the water itself.

We describe light in the same way but call it an imaginary wave because no-one can say what is going up and down. Naming a cause doesn’t explain it, so the term electromagnetic field is just a placeholder for what we don’t understand. Yet if light is a wave, it must vibrate on space, and this is something we find difficult to imagine.

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Maxwell’s equations describe light waves that vibrate in the imaginary plane of complex numbers, so the nothing of empty space vibrates in a direction that is nowhere in physical space. Current theory is that the primal existence we call light is a wave of nothing vibrating nowhere. In contrast, if space is a surface, light can be a wave on that surface, and if that surface is made by quantum processing, it can be a processing wave. This section explores the idea that light is a processing wave passed on by a quantum network that is the “… primary world-stuff” (Wilczek, 2008, p74), whose nodes some call the “atoms of space” (Bojowald, 2008).

3.2.1. Light is a Wave

3.2.2. We are Flatlanders

3.2.3. The Medium of Light

3.2.4. The Speed of Space

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As Feynman famously said:

“… all the mystery of quantum mechanics is contained in the double-slit experiment.” (Satinover, 2001) p127.

Quantum theory explains Young’s results as follows:

A photon wave function spreads in space by the equations of quantum theory. This ghostly wave goes through both slits to interfere with itself as it exits but if observed immediately “collapses” to be a particle in one place, as if it had always been so. If we put detectors in the slits, it collapses to one or the other with equal probability. If we put a screen behind the slits, it interferes with itself, then collapses on the screen due to the prior interference.

The mathematics doesn’t say what this wave is that goes through both slits, nor why it shrinks to a point particle when observed, hence Wheeler’s question: How come the quantum?

To see how strange this is, suppose the initial photon in a two-slit experiment hits a screen at some point to become the first dot of what will always turn into an interference pattern. Now suppose that in another experiment with a detector blocking the other slit, the initial photon goes through the same slit to hit the screen at the same point to become the first dot of what will never be an interference pattern. The difference between these outcomes must exist from the start but the physical events are identical – a photon goes through the same slit to hit the same screen point. The only difference is whether the slit the photon didn’t go through was blocked or not.

How can blocking the path that the photon didn’t take be part of the later result of an interference pattern or not? How can the slit a photon could have gone through but didn’t decide if there is interference or not? How can a counterfactual, an event that didn’t physically happen, change a physical outcome?

In a purely physical world, such a thing is impossible. Quantum theory’s unlikely tale of imaginary waves that collapse when viewed makes no physical sense, yet it is the most fertile theory in the history of science. This leaves two key issues unresolved:

1. What are quantum waves? What exactly is it that spreads through space as a wave? The current answer, that the waves that predict physical events don’t exist, is unsatisfactory.

2. What is quantum collapse? Why do quantum waves restart at a point when viewed? The current answer, that quantum waves collapse “because they do”, is equally unsatisfactory.

Until it answers these questions, quantum mechanics is just a recipe without a rationale.

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After centuries of dispute over whether light is a wave or particles, Bohr devised the wave-particle compromise that holds today suggesting in the 1920’s that the two views are “complementary”, i.e. both true, and nothing better has been found since:

“…nobody has found anything else which is consistent yet, so when you refer to the Copenhagen interpretation of the mechanics what you really mean is quantum mechanics.” (Davies & Brown, 1999) p71.

The resulting don’t ask, don’t tell policy lets a photon be a wave when we don’t look as long as it is a particle when we do, so physics can apply particle or wave equations as convenient. In no physical pond do rippling waves turn into particles nor do billiard-ball particles ever become waves, but Bohr successfully sold the big lie that light is a wavicle. As Gell-Mann said in his 1976 Nobel Prize speech:

“Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem (of the interpretation of quantum mechanics) had been solved fifty years ago.”

Bohr’s wave-particle dualism is a mystical marriage of convenience between incompatible domains, accepted by those who want to believe, just like Descartes’ mind-body dualism.

Physical realism, that the physical world is all there is, has no room for a quantum world that doesn’t follow physical laws (Figure 3.4a). Bohr’s Copenhagen dualism, that the quantum world could be said to exist alongside the physical world solely for the convenience of physics was an admission of failure not a theory advance (Figure 3.4b) (Audretsch, 2004) p14). It was the beginning of fake physics, for even as he publicly accepted that quantum theory implies a quantum world that in some way exists, he denied the quantum world existed at all in private. One can’t have the best of both worlds if they are incompatible.

Quantum realism rejects both physical realism and Bohr’s Copenhagen compromise. It proposes instead that physical events are a subset of quantum events (Figure 3.4c) so classical mechanics is a subset of quantum mechanics. We now explore this possibility.

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Note: A “big lie” is a statement so outrageous that people think it must be right or it wouldn’t be said.

Wave-particle dualism is embodied in a simple experiment carried out by Young over two hundred years ago that still baffles physics today – he shone light through two slits to get an interference pattern on a screen (Figure 3.2). Only waves diffract like this so light must be a wave but if so, why do light rays follow lines? Conversely, if photons are particles, how can they interfere like waves?

To find the answer, physicists sent one photon at a time through Young’s slits. Each photon gave the expected dot on the screen as a particle would but over time the dots formed an interference pattern whose most likely impact was behind the barrier between the slits! The effect was independent of time, so one photon shot through the slits each day still gave an interference pattern. Since each photon can’t know where the previous one hit, how does “interference” occur?

In an objective world, one could just see which slit a photon went through before it hit but our world doesn’t work like this. Detectors placed in the slits to see where the photon goes just fire half the time as expected. A photon always goes by one slit or another, never through both, so interference shouldn’t be possible. When we look, we see a photon particle but when we don’t, it behaves like a wave. It is as if a single skier set off, went around both sides of a tree on the way, then crossed the finish line as one skier (Figure 3.3).

The problem is:

1. If a photon is a wave, why doesn’t the photon smear over the detector screen as a wave would?

2. If a photon is a particle, how can one photon at a time give an interference pattern?

The problem applies to every quantum entity as electrons, atoms and even molecules show Young’s two-slit diffraction (M. Arndt, O. Nairz, J. Voss-Andreae, C. Keller, & Zeilinger, 1999).

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The question of whether light is a wave or particles has a long history. In the seventeenth century Huygens noted that light beams at right angles pass right through each other like waves while arrow-like particles should collide. He concluded that light was an expanding wave front that spreads in all directions, with each strike point the center of a new little wavelet. If the wavelets interfere as they spread, the trough of one wave will cancel the crest of another to give a forward moving envelope that at a distance from the source acts like a ray of light (Figure 3.1a). Huygen’s Principle that each wave front point is a new wavelet source spreading in all directions explained reflection, refraction and diffraction.

In contrast, Newton noted that light travels in straight lines rather than bending round corners as sound waves do when we hear someone talking in the next room, so concluded that light was particle-like corpuscles that traveled in straight lines to match the optics of the day. His particle model explained only reflection and refraction (Figure 3.1b) but for some reason carried the day.

Two hundred years later, Maxwell, building on Faraday’s idea of a field, wrote the equations of light as an electromagnetic wave based on a mechanical model of rotating vortexes. The equations worked so they were quickly accepted, and this seemed to settle the matter that light was a wave.

Maxwell’s original equations assumed that light waves travel through a “luminiferous aether” but the Michelson-Morley experiment then dispelled the idea that light traveled in a physical medium. Then Einstein equally convincingly argued from the photo-electric effect that light comes in particle-like packets called photons. The result was two theories, both of which worked to a degree.

Over centuries, the theory of light has swung from Huygens’ waves to Newton’s corpuscles to Maxwell’s waves to Einstein’s photon packets with no clear winner, so modern physics finally gave up. It concludes that light is wave and a particle, though no-one can explain how such a wavicle is possible. Three centuries after Huygens and Newton, we still don’t know whether light is a wave or a particle and the miracle of wave-particle duality essentially enshrines our ignorance. Physical realism could have explained light as a particle or as a wave but it can’t explain how it can be both.

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Science reduces the question What is light? to what it does but the mystery remains that what it does isn’t physically possible. Even after centuries of study, physics still can’t say why:

1. Light doesn’t fade. Every physical wave diminishes in amplitude over time but light doesn’t, even after it has traveled for billions of years.

2. Light has a constant speed. The speed of a wave depends on the medium it travels through but light goes at a constant speed in space that is physically nothing.

3. Light is a wave and a particle. It is physically impossible for a wave to act like a particle or for a particle to act like a wave but light is a wavicle that denies this.

4. Light always finds the fastest path. It isn’t possible for a physical particle to find the fastest path to every possible destination but light does.

5. Light chooses its path after it arrives. A physical particle can’t pick the path it takes to a given destination after it arrives but light does just that.

6. Light can reveal an object it doesn’t physically touch. In a purely physical world, it shouldn’t be possible to detect an object without touching it but light does exactly that.

7. Light vibrates outside space. Light vibrates into a dimension that doesn’t physically exist.

Most physicists think light is physical yet physical reality can’t explain what it does. The paradox that physical light acts in non-physical ways is exemplified by wave-particle duality, that light is like a wave sometimes and sometimes like a particle. A wave traveling in a medium doesn’t arrive like a particle at a point, but light does. A particle going in one direction can’t go in many directions at once like a wave, but light does. No physical wave ever becomes a particle and no physical particle becomes a wave, but light seems to exist as a mixture of both.

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Even in pre-scientific times, light was considered primal. In Egypt, light from the Sun god Aten sustained all, and in the bible, God created light before the sun, moon, stars or man. Light is still all around us today but it remains a mystery. As Einstein said just before he died:

“All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.” (Walker, 2000) p89

This statement remains true today because science still can’t answer the question “What is light?”

QR3.1.1 The Mystery of Light

QR3.1.2 Is Light a Particle or Wave?

QR3.1.3 Young’s Experiment

QR3.1.4 The Copenhagen Compromise

QR3.1.5 How Come The Quantum?

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Quantum Realism Part I. the observed Reality…

Chapter 3. The Light of Existence

Brian Whitworth, New Zealand

“There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Douglas Adams, 1995

If the universe booted-up from one photon, in the beginning there was light but not as we know it. The last chapter proposed that a white-hot point of light ripped our universe from the quantum womb in a massive million, billion, billion, billionth of a second chain reaction, until expanding space cooled things down enough to stop it. The tiny inflated region then expanded at light speed and its quantum fluctuations were the seeds from which galaxies and stars formed. In this view, light was the first “thing” to exist so it is natural that we have often wondered what is light?                                        Download Whole Chapter

QR3.1.   What is Light?

QR3.2.   The Quantum Wave

QR3.3.   The Quantum Process

QR3.4.   Quantum Processing Spreads

QR3.5.   Quantum Processing Restarts

QR3.6.   Light Takes Every Path

QR3.7.   Quantum Spin

QR3.8.   Physics Revisited

QR3.9.   Redefining Reality

Summary Table

Discussion Questions

References

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