Prime Ideas

If you spend any time at all studying Quantum Physics, then I’m sure you’ve already read numerous examples and claims about the two-slit experiment.  In fact, if you’ve been paying attention, you probably already figured out, that this is one of the most important experiments presented.  You won’t pickup a book or watch a documentary on Quantum Physics, that the person doesn’t at least offer a glimpse of what this experiment means. 

The problem however, arises when only these explanations are entertained. Can there not be others that make just as much sense?  Could we be interpreting the data wrong?  Does Quantum Physics have to have that mystical quality about it that puts it in line with the unknown, unexplainable, unattainable?

While I don’t purport to be an expert, nor do I claim vast knowledge on the subject, I have read numerous volumes on the subject and have my own opinion.  That is the reason for this blog entry today.  Not to tell the answer, but to offer up another possible piece of the puzzle in Quantum Physics.

First I’d like to explain the experiment:  The two-slit experiment was originally done using sunlight and a few small cards that split the light.  The goal was to determine if light was particle or wave.  The thought was, that if indeed it were a particle, splitting it up would amount to having a simple shadow on the wall where the light was broken apart.  In this case, you can think of shooting small bullets at a wall, with another surface positioned between you and the wall.  The bullets could hit everywhere on the wall, except for the small area where you are being blocked.

Now if we expand on this theory and add a second wall, again, we should see bullets hitting the wall everywhere except where our two dividers or blocks are positioned.  Seeing this would prove that light acted like a particle (or really small bullets) of light.  However, the results baffled everyone that looked.  What happened when they added the second slit, caused the shadows on the back wall to cancel each other out and instead of having two slits of light, we had many small strips of shadow and light moving across the wall.  The only way to explain what was seen, was that the light was moving as a wave (much like an ocean wave) and that as it passed through the two slits and redefined itself on the backside of our slits, the two separate waves started to cancel each other out and didn’t reach the back wall as a solid line of light and dark, but of back and forth patterns based on the width and distance apart of our slits.

However, our great experimenter didn’t stop there.  He next decided that he needed to know what would happen if he were to fire a single electron at the slits.  Would he get two slits on the back wall like you’d expect when firing a single bullet through the hole?  His thought of course, was yes, he would.  After all, how would you get an interference pattern when only firing a single electron?  What would it be interfering with?

Things are not so simple in this wonderful universe however, and what we see when firing a single electron through the slits, is that after a period of time we begin to see the same patterns that we saw when sending billions through.  Of course it takes a few hours of doing this to get a definable pattern, but they are there nonetheless.  But how could this be?  What are they interfering with as they move through the slits?  This is where all known logic stops and imaginations take over.  After all, how could one think logically in relation to such a strange occurrence?

More experiments were designed that tested to see exactly which slit a single electron went through when they fired it.  But what happened was that whichever slit they looked through, the electron would enter the other.  Like the electron saw them looking and went somewhere else.  So next they attempted to look into both slits together to see what would happen and things got even stranger!  Now, when looking at both holes, the pattern stopped completely and the expected result of two slits on the back wall showed up.  Like, because we looked, the wave pattern stopped.

After many years of thinking about these strange results, scientists decided that what has to be happening, is that the electron is going through both holes at the same time.  That it exists at all possible locations at once, and that by us looking to see what its doing, we force it to choose one specific location, therefore canceling out all others and canceling out the wave properties of its movement.  That until we look at something, it doesn’t exist in a single location, but in all locations.  All things happen at the same time and only by our observance do we force one single result to show up.  These thoughts led to such things as multi-world universes where upon each decision that must be made, causes an infinite number of parallel universes to spring up in order to allow all cases to be true, yet only one result to show in each separate universe.

Yes I know, this is getting rather deep indeed and I’ll stop there.  You can purchase a few books if you’d like to read up on this further.  However, I wanted to end this entry with another plausible solution to the results seen during these tests.  One that not many people will except because they’ve long ruled out the existence of a specific property that I think must exist for anything to work.  Something they say is not required and can’t be seen.  This something, is called the Aether.  Its something that scientist of old always thought existed.  It’s like the water that carries our waves across the ocean.  After all, water is not a wave; it’s just the medium in which the wave travels.  So it made logical sense to them that this must be true.

However, no one could ever detect the existence of the Aether and Einstein came along with his Theory of Relativity and all but put a nail in its coffin.  He declared that you didn’t need the Aether for things to exist, but he always left room for something existing.  He just didn’t know what. 

One more small point before I give my explanation.  Quantum Physics is not an exact science.  It in fact is a system of mathematical equations that form predictions of where particles will appear based on a complex stream of input.  But over the years, it has again and again proved correct in its assumptions so everyone lends more and more magical qualities to its facets.  The most interesting quality of Quantum Physics functions however is just what they are…  They are what are referred to as “Wave Functions”!!!

In all definitions of a wave, it’s an energy force that travels through some medium, yet scientists were now telling us a medium isn’t necessary.  That light and electrons travel through nothingness!  Think of a wave in water.  If there is nothing going on with the water, such as it sitting in a glass, it just sits there, nothing happens.  But if you splash your finger into the glass, you see a wave.  The wave is a result of the energy traveling through the water that you added with your finger.

So, if we were to add the properties of the Aether back into existence and then push a light particle along its surface, we would be making a wave much like the wave of the ocean, or our glass of water.  It’s only a single finger in our glass and it’s only a single particle in our experiment.  But the wave exists nonetheless.  So as the light particle moves towards the slits, it travels within the wave it is creating as it moves.  The wave hits the slits and then separates, carrying the particle to the back screen, canceling out in areas and enforcing in others just like a water wave would behave.  Yet, we have only a single particle, not billions of the same particles existing in all realms at once.

So now we have offered another example of the problem without going mystic.  So what about the looking part of the problem.  After all, when we looked at the particles they changed their behavior.  I think this is plausible as well. To explain, lets think about our water again.  If I were to create a wave that moved through two slits, and in those slits I setup screens to filter the water though, would I not essentially be canceling out the wave itself?  I would smooth out my original waves so that on the backside of the slits they would not longer be waves.

To help think about this, you have to think about what it is to look at something.  In order for us to see anything, including detecting light particles, we have to look.  But what can we look with?  Well, with light of course.  But wait! if we look with light particles, that means that we are shooting our light particle with other light particles, would this not effect our original particle in some major way?  As another example, imagine having a large boat floating across the ocean making waves and we are much larger in size.  We can’t see the waves, nor the boat, but we know they are there from experiments.  But we want to see what is going on, so because we are so massive compared to our boats, we fire other boats of equal size at our single boat in order to determine where it is at any particular moment in time.  So looking at something is not quite as simple as just looking!  But then this opens up a whole different topic indeed, so lets just stick to the subject at hand.

As you can see, applying Occum’s Razor to the topic might yield a little better explanation of what we see (or don’t see), and allow us to provide a better explanation of the expected results without going mystic.  Is this the answer?  I don’t know, but I suspect its a lot closer than having billions of universes popping into existence every second of our lives!

–glenn hancock

I have been studying quantum physics and the ideas it presents for a while now.  The one thing that I keep coming back to is that it can’t be that complicated.  While I’ve got a lot of ideas along this line I wanted to take a minute to detail an idea that I just had related to why light travels as a wave and as particles and why it slows down (or appears to around larger objects compared to being in a less gravitational state) in certain conditions.

The first idea is that of light as a wave and a particle concept.  I think light is nothing but a particle and the wave principle that is witnessed, while being real, is in fact nothing more than the movement through a medium just like every other wave does.  The question only becomes what the medium is.  For lack of a better word, we’ll use the centuries old idea of the aether. 

The concept is basically that there is no existence of nothing.  Something exists everywhere.  Just because you can’t see it and can’t measure it, doesn’t eliminate the possibility that it exists.

And to think you could measure it might only make sense if you could somehow remove yourself from its presence which is impossible because I think it is the substance that holds the universe together.  In the end, everything exists inside the aether.

The theory of relativity shows that to measure the aether is quite impossible because as you travel faster and faster or get in a stronger and stronger field of gravity, the things in which you use to see and measure also become effected.  That while you yourself see the 1 meter stick as still being 1 meter, someone looking at you from another point of reference might see it longer or shorter.  This doesn’t mean that you are wrong, or that they are wrong, but that you both have different views of the same situation.

So lets think about this for a second.  If the aether does exist, and light travels through it instead of traveling through nothing, how could this help explain how things shrink or stretch due to your speed or proximity to something large such as the earth.  Well, we know that light travels at a set speed no matter where we find it.  So lets think of light as moving from one particle of aether to another forever.  If we were to relax pressure on the aether and therefore allow it to exist in its natural state, then light, as well as time, would appear to move at a more rapid state, because each progression moves it farther along its way.

Now lets put pressure on it due to large objects moving through it, or speed our space ship up closer to the speed of light where we are placing pressure on the aether around the ship.  In this case the aether is more packed together and one movement of the light actually moves a shorter distance.  Therefore time, the appearance of our meter stick and everything else based on measuring, appears to be closer together or slower.  Its not that they physically are different but everything we base our lives on is the measurement of what we see.  If we exist within certain boundaries then we will always see a meter stick as being 1 meter.  If we take that same stick to another location with less compression or more compression of the aether (more gravity or less) then we will also see the stick as being the same meter in length. However, when looking at things between these two boundries (if this were possible), you would both think something was wrong with the other.

While being in the gravity of the Sun for example:  you might view things going on here on earth as rapidly firing by and visa versa.  Earthlings would see you on the Sun as poking by more slowly than they could bare to watch.  But if asked between you which was right and which was wrong, you would both respond that things were perfectly normal for you both.  Nothing seems off, because nothing is off.  Light and therefore measurement as a whole, just seem to move differently because of the proximity of the physical substance in which light passes through.

So, if you were to be on a space ship speeding along at just under the speed of light, and you turned on a flash light, would you see the light stand still, or would you see it speed away even faster?  And if it sped away, wouldn’t it exceed the speed of light and therefore prove the Theory of Relativity wrong?  Well, if you think about this for a minute, you will quickly realize that when you turn on the flash light inside the ship, you will measure its light as precisely the speed of light.  With no bearing on the speed of your space ship.  Why you ask?  Well, because as we discussed above, the aether is more compact where you exist now.  This means that everything you experience (even though you won’t be able to tell) is closer and more compact.  This includes your measurement devices.  So while the light may indeed physically be moving slower than normal when viewed from another point of reference, you will not see it.  Because it propagates from one aether particle to the next just like normal, there just happens to be more of it in less distance, but when you measure it, it will appear exactly the same as it did on earth.

–glenn hancock