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On Jan 17, 2014, at 9:06 AM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:
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Begin forwarded message:From: Basil Hiley
Date: January 17, 2014 at 3:11:50 AM PST
To: Ruth Kastner
Subject: Re: Addinall's assessment of Jim's theoryWhenever I see the term “Bohm picture" my heart sinks. Bohm never had one picture. I have never had one picture. Our starting point was that we did not find the majority view on quantum mechanics held in the 50s and 60s began to touch the questions we felt deserved answers. Yes we could recite the formal mantra and get results that agreed with experiment but we wanted more. There were too many questions that could not be framed in the available mathematical language physicists had at their disposal then. For me the main question was “Why had the observer become central to the theory?” The universe existed before there were observers and the quantum formalism could not handle that situation.It those days the appeal was to find a “realist” interpretation, but what was the meaning of the term “realist”? There were two extremes: there is no 'realist picture', just the mathematics or at the other extreme we take the classical view as basic and just change it a little, say, by adding hidden variables. What Bohm discovered while playing with the WBK approximation was that up to the first and second approximation we could still maintain the notion of a particle following a trajectory. At what stage of the approximation do we abandon the notion of a particle? There is nothing in the formalism to give us an answer, so don’t truncate the series. Following that line Bohm was led to propose his 52 model. It is remarkable how far that idea offers a way into quantum phenomena.Please note for Bohm and for myself this is only the beginning and leads to number of questions.Firstly: if we take the idea of a classical particle, an object that exists as a solid entity in it own right independent of everything else, then there should be some ‘ultimon’, but there doesn’t seem to be any ‘ultimon'. To every particle there is an anti-particle and we know what happens when they meet! Where is the little rock? There doesn’t seem to be one. The nucleon is a hive of activity. Remember QM was introduced to explain the stability of matter.Secondly: Bohm immediately noticed that his analysis did not cover the photon. The classical limit in this case is the field. Already in the appendix of his 52 paper, he proposed that the field and its conjugate momentum should be treated as the two beables. With one of our students Pan Kaloyerou, we later took this analysis much further. We illustrated the principles lying behind the ideas using a scalar field and later Pan treated the em field. Where was the photon in this approach? What we found was that the energy is stored in the field and can, at best, be quasi localised in an excited state of the field. In our paper (Phys. Reps. 144 (1987) 349-375) we show how the notion of a photon arises as the energy absorbed by an atom. The non-linear, non-local super quantum potential sweeps out an quantum of energy, sufficient to excite the atom to one of its higher energy states. This gives the impression that photon exchange has taken place. We noticed further that the field does not need to contain energy in fixed units of hν. This is where coherent states come in. We also explained how this enables us to explain two-slit interference without the photons travelling along trajectories. NB Photons do not travel on trajectories! We even explained the interference of two independent lasers as observed in the Pfleegor-Mandel experiment. The details are contained in our paper and a later paper by Pan Kaloyerou.Thirdly: Since there is no ‘ultimon’, where do we start? We touched on this question in the last chapter of the Undivided Universe. However since then I have taken the story a lot further. I assume that we must start with activity or process which can be described by what I call the algebra of process. I have recently presented these ideas in Process, Distinction, Groupoids and Clifford Algebras: an Alternative View of the Quantum Formalism, in New Structures for Physics, ed Coecke, B., Lecture Notes in Physics, vol. 813, pp. 705-750, Springer (2011). There I show how the basic symplectic and rotational symmetries emerge and can be linked up with the von Neumann-Moyal non-commutative algebraic approach which shows how the Bohm approach emerges from the heart of what are now called quantum algebras that were originally discussed under the title 'Heisenberg matrix mechanics'. We now have the mathematics available to see exactly how to develop the quantum ideas without being trapped in the standard Hilbert space formalism.Basil.
On 17 Jan 2014, at 02:14, Ruth Kastner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote: