Part V: The Copenhagen (Mis)Interpretation!

Most of the public little cares what the Copenhagen Interpretation is about or how it affects their lives, if it even affects their lives.  But most of the theoretical physicists and the physicists of the world know about it whether they accept it or not.  What they do know is that little, if any, understands it, though the mathematics works well, and they have to accept that.

            The Copenhagen Interpretation is based upon six principles.  They are as follows, as per Wikipedia;

1.     A system is completely described by a wave function ψ, representing an observer's subjective knowledge of the system.

2.     The description of nature is essentially probabilistic, with the probability of an event related to the square of the amplitude of the wave function related to it.

3.     It is not possible to know the value of all the properties of the system at the same time; those properties that are not known with precision must be described by probabilities.

4.     Matter exhibits a wave–particle duality. An experiment can show the particle-like properties of matter, or the wave-like properties; in some experiments both of these complementary viewpoints must be invoked to explain the results, according to the complementarity principle of Niels Bohr.

5.     Measuring devices are essentially classical devices, and measure only classical properties such as position and momentum.

6.     The quantum mechanical description of large systems will closely approximate the classical description.

Einstein and Bohr argued these points many times.  Einstein believed in causality, cause and effect, and Bohr believed in probability, perhaps and maybe, depending upon the experience.  But the arguments were all based upon an oxymoronic principle called the uncertainty principle, one of the tenets stated above.  We will discuss them all.

I just read the book, “QUANTUM” by Manjit Kumar which was very interesting.  But the argument is about whether Quantum Mechanics or Wave Mechanics is the valid description of the atomic world.  Ultimately, as you see above, they had to settle for both descriptions as the standard theory.  Most physicists do not like it this way, but the math works out, so they accept it.  Unlike what it says above in Wikipedia, Quantum Mechanics was formulated by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and Wave Mechanics was formulated by Erwin Schrödinger.

Let us discuss the fundamental argument on which most of this resides and that is the uncertainty principle which I call the oxymoronic principle.  The concept in both classical and probability physics is that both position and momentum can be calculated to only a certain accuracy.  Heisenberg said that one cannot know the position or momentum of a particle to within the accuracy of h/2p, where h is Planck’s constant and p is the standard 3.14….

This is an oxymoronic argument.  Let us reword it another way; ‘you cannot know the state of rest, position, or the state of unrest, momentum, of a particle at the same time.’  Well, duh!  Why Einstein argued against this with Bohr for so many years is odd since his own theory of special relativity proved this very point which I pointed out in Part I; that rest and uniform linear translation are the same uniform motion, only different by the observer’s point of view.  In other words, position and momentum are opposite sides of the same coin.  Both are uniform motion and are only dependent on the observer’s reference frame with respect to the object being observed.  This is exactly what the Copenhagen Interpretation says about quantum mechanics; it is observer dependent, which is right, but also that reality does not exist without an observer, which is wrong.

Although Einstein wanted to believe in causality his own theories argued against it and Niels Bohr used this point against him in one of their greatest arguments ever.  Einstein argued that if you had a box that could only let one photon escape and a clock in the box was synchronized with another clock in the room, then if the box was weighed before the photon escaped and just after the photon escaped, then you could know both the time and energy precisely.  Bohr argued that, just as I pointed out in Part III that the gravitational field at the top of the room was slightly different from the field at the bottom of the room, so one could not precisely synchronize the clocks closer the h/2p, even if the box only moved by the weight of a photon, losing Einstein the argument.

In the Einstein-Bohr argument I am surprised that Einstein did not invoke his thought experiment that lead to the understanding of the gravitational field, and that is the man in the infinitely accelerated elevator far removed from any fields far out into space.  In this scenario the acceleration is uniform throughout the elevator and does not vary from top to bottom and one could truly get a precise measurement.  This was the last puzzle Bohr had written own his chalk board before he died.  I think he must have suspected this variation left him without an argument.

Einstein in most of these arguments was arguing against himself and his own theories.  If he and Bohr and most of the physicists of the day had not been bracketed by Einstein’s own successes, they could have possibly realized all they had to do was to add the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field as separate fields into the equations and everything would have worked properly.  Instead, they designed the concept of wave mechanics and probability into the theories, which in a limited manner helped explain some of the ambiguities, but it did not, as Einstein suspected, make the theory complete.

Bohr argued that all systems are described by a wave function and the collapse of this function whenever it is observed by an observer produces a wave or particle.  Einstein thought this was ludicrous and he was right.  It is either a particle or a wave, but how could it be both? One must remove the observer from the equations in order to have a unified field theory. 

Let us describe a scenario where this actually occurs and is observed by almost everyone.  In the old western movies or even some of the modern ones where a stagecoach is being chased by Indians or outlaws, when one looks at the wheels of the stagecoach the spokes appear as a wave going around and around the hub.  We know that the wheels do not have waves, but spokes that run from the hub to the rim that are going around and around. 

The reason we see waves is because the speed of the camera taking the picture is going one speed and the wheels are turning at another.  If the camera speed taking pictures is slightly faster than the wheels are turning the waves appear to move backwards, but if the camera speed is slightly slower than the speed at which the wheels are turning the wave appears to be moving forward.  In either case we know they are not waves, even though it looks that way.  In this scenario our camera is our measuring instrument and the spokes in the wheels are what we are measuring.  According to modern physicists and Bohr in order to see the spokes in the wheel with our camera we must collapse the wave function; stop the stagecoach!

Dose this mean that the waves suddenly turn into spokes or that the spokes were magically waves. No.  Imagine, if you will, an electron that runs up one side of the spoke from the hub to the rim and then down the other side of the spoke back to and around the hub and back again.  This is the orbit of the electron around the nucleus of an atom.  Now, also imagine that the radius of this orbit also rotates around the hub of the wheel at 1/137 times the speed of light.  In this scenario we would have a particle that, with our measuring instruments, would look like a cloudy wave moving around the nucleus of an atom.

This is not a strained or far fetched scenario.  It happens in our solar system.  The most notable planet that does this is Mercury.  I have been told that if the nucleus of an atom was the size of a baseball and the electron was the size of a BB the radius would be the size of a football field.  If we shrank the Sun down to the size of a baseball and Mercury down to the size of a BB, with its precession moving around the Sun at 1/137 times the speed of light it would look like a cloudy wave moving around the Sun from any stand point of someone observing from far out into space.

How then do we get a picture of the spokes of the wheels of the stagecoach without stopping the stagecoach?  Today we use, in our cameras, what is known as stop action.  That is the camera takes a picture so fast of the turning wheels that the spokes appear to be frozen in motion as if the wheel was at rest with the observer or the observer was moving around and around in sync with the wheels.

In classical physics momentum and position were thought to be easily calculated.  In fact, this is one of the reasons calculus was invented by Newton and Leibnitz, but the truth of the matter is that one can only calculate a position that a system is passing through when it is moving.  If a train is moving down a track one can calculate where along the line at any given point it will be passing through at any given moment, but that does not mean the train has a position at that point, only that it is passing through that point at that moment.  It only has position when it is sitting at a terminal and then it has no momentum.  You can have position or momentum, but you cannot have both at the same time.  These are an observer’s dependent determinations.

If the observer is riding on the train, then that train has position with respect to that observer and not with the observer standing along the tracks on the side.  With respect to the observer standing along side the tracks the train has momentum.  To have one you must give up the other, this is why the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is oxymoronic.  What it demonstrates is that no particles in space or time can be motionless or at absolute rest since this is an observer dependent participation.  It should be called the principle of minimal motion or principle of least action as found by Maupertuis and Euler. 

It also answers the ancient philosopher Zeno’s puzzle; if you keep taking half the distance to the wall can you ever reach the wall?  What Heisenberg’s minimal motion principle shows is that at some point in space and time a half step becomes a whole step and that is when you reach the wall.

There is a reason that Schrodinger’s wave equation works so well.  It is the Hamiltonian, or the unified field equation as stated previously in Part II, Faster Than Light.  In fact, the wave equation is often written as Hy = Ey, where H is the Hamiltonian of kinetic energy plus potential energy and E is the total energy and y is the wave function. 

However, the concept of a wave is misleading just as the wave in the stagecoach wheels are misleading.  Physicists assume because it is a wave there should be a continuous transition of energy from trough to crest or that it is a multitude of waves superimposed upon one another.  They forget to consider the transfer like a potentiometer.  The energy builds until it reaches a certain potential of transfer and then it jumps to its next level.  These levels can be jumped to simply by the influx of energy from a photon.  It simply goes from one level to the next without a smooth transfer, like a sprinter going from stop to full speed in a race.

Also, Schrodinger introduced the potential energy simply to complete the equation because it seemed the logical thing to do.  He was right.  But no one has considered where this potential energy should come from except that it should be there.  They assume that the potential energy is the energy of the particle when it is at relative rest, but this is untrue since the particle is never really at rest.  The potential energy comes from the gravitational potential attached to the minimal neutral mass of the particle.

Without using a lot of equations, I will try to explain it.  J. J. Thompson developed an equation that showed the theoretical electromagnetic radius to be equal to the electronic unit squared divided by the mass of the electron times the speed of light squared.  Now if you add to this equation the gravitational mass of the electron and the field it produces one is left with a gravitational radial equation that is half the size of the Schwarzschild radius, first proposed by Karl Schwarzschild after the publication of Einstein’s General Relativity, plus the electronic radius.  This gravitational radius is so small as to be almost virtually insignificant, but it is not. 

In this equation one must use the Lorentzian mass in motion.  This is a relativity mass that increases in mass with increase velocity.  The reason is that it uses the concept of a mass particle that fluctuates in mass with varying velocities and since we already know that the electron is never at true rest we can use this equation.  It also shows the particle nature of the mass rather than the wave concept of the mass.

When we do this, we find that as the neutral mass increases either with relative velocity or because of an increase of the particle mass the electronic influence decreases and the gravitational influence increases.  We also find, using the binomial theorem on both sides, that if we divide out the electronic term we are left with a gravitational potential of the gravitational constant times the particle mass divided by the electronic radius that increases by itself plus itself times the fine structure constant squared.  (Most of the public doesn’t know or care what the fine structure constant is, but most physicists will.  It has also been known as the coupling constant and in this case, it couples gravitation and electromagnetism.)

If we multiply this whole equation by the kinetic energy of a photon, collect like terms, multiply through by the speed of light squared and convert the terms into the proper format we will finish with precisely the same form as the Balmer formula for frequency spectrums.  This demonstrates that the potential energy of Schrodinger’s wave equation is derived from the gravitational potential of the particle mass.

If we approach the concept of probabilities with respect to Max Born’s equation, we must understand that Dr. Steven Weinberg made a pertinent observation.  Paraphrasing, he simply stated that in the observer observing the collapse of the wave function the observer is also a wave function.  The question then becomes; what is the probability of the observed event and the observer both being at this position in time and space to observe one another?

Let us take the train scenario to help explain.  We have two observers with clocks that have been synchronized by video cameras.  One is standing beside the tracks and the other is riding on the train moving along the tracks at a steady rate.  By calculations both observers can know when they will be passing each other so that they each have another camera set to snap a picture at a precise time set on the clocks to capture a picture of the other observer.  Both calculations will be the same with respect to each observer because both are at relative rest with respect to their environment.

Both pictures will show that both clocks are slowed at relatively the same rate.  This is not a wave collapse of superimposed waves but rather wave reinforcement.  When an observer observes an event, it does not collapse the wave function of the event but rather reinforces the reality of the event.  What this means is that both events, independent of their own time coordinate, must share a temporal dimension where both events occur at a point in time and space that is common to both.  This point in time and space is independent and external to both events.  In this way both events become a single event occurring at this point and time in this common space.  It also means that both events can occur without the observance of the other.

The Born rule states that, if we are given a wave function y(x,y,z,t) for a single structureless particle in position space, this reduces to saying that the probability density function p(x,y,z) for a measurement of the position at time t₀ will be given by p(x,y,z) = y[(x,y,z,t₀)]^2.The simple error in this equation is the time coordinate.  It should be written in a fashion which considers the common time with respect to both events, not just the time with respect to the observer.  We could write it simply in this fashion by saying the function has a probability density function for a measurement of the space with a common time, t_C, given by p(x,y,z)=Y [x,y,z,t₁,t₂]². (the brackets mean absolute value)

Although Einstein argued against his own theories, without knowing it, he was essentially right; quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. Separating the mechanics of electrodynamics from the mechanics of gravity and adding them together is the only way to achieve unity. We have to leave behind the upper limiting velocity of light, which is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and realize that charged particles and neutral particles, while similar, are different. Just because E=mc², it does not mean that a particle loses its relative rest potential energy, mc², because it has kinetic energy, mv²/2, as well, since we now know that rest and uniform linear translation are observant dependent scenarios.

Next, we will discuss how black holes and wormholes are inventions that do not fit with the concepts of special relativity at all.