I’m headed to London for the EmQM 2017 conference Oct 26 – 28 2017, which will I am looking forward to.

I attended in 2015. The event has the byline – the 4th International Symposium about Quantum Mechanics based on a »Deeper Level Theory«. Its mission this year is

Towards Ontology of Quantum Mechanics and the Conscious Agent
David Bohm Centennial Symposium

When I first really understood what quantum mechanics really was – in second-year undergrad at the University of Toronto, I immediately read all sorts of books and papers by and about Bohm’s theories. He made quite a change in my outlook of physics in general. I became convinced in 1985 that quantum mechanics was incomplete and that something along the lines of Bohm’s theory was the way to go. That makes the conference more special for me, and I’m sure many other attendees share the same view.

I am presenting a poster which I’m still polishing that up right now (the abstract at least was well received!). Its based on a paper called ‘Fully Classical Quantum Gravity (see link)‘. I have renamed the poster to Stochastic Gravity and Ontological Quantum Mechanics and rewritten most of it.

The poster describes the results of a paper by Vinante et al. :

Improved noninterferometric test of collapse models using ultracold cantilevers . If the results hold up, they are quite breathtaking as they state:



The finite intercept, clearly visible in the inset of Fig. 3 implies that the data are not compatible with a pure thermal noise behavior, and a nonthermal ex-cess noise is present.

The paper details the careful procedures followed to chase down possible experimental problems. The analysis is carefully thought out. The paper claims the results show a possible signature of Adler’s Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL), but to me it seems like if the results hold up that its simply a great puzzle to solve! My take (in line with the ‘Fully Classical Quantum Gravity‘ paper) is that this noise is caused by the continuous emission and/or absorption of gravitational waves at nuclear frequencies.

Gravitational waves are notoriously hard to see, and these high-frequency ones (HFGWs) even more so. Indeed, since gravitational wave power goes with the square of frequency, truly tiny values of the gravitational wave strain ‘h’ (h == 0 in flat space and h < 1) make for large energy fluxes. The LIGO observations saw gravitational waves with $h \sim 10 ^{-2}$ . The formula for the flux of a gravitational wave is:

So LIGO can see gravitational waves with a flux of about $1^{-3} watts/m^2$, while at nuclear frequencies like $10^{15} Hz$, the same formula yields an incredible $10^{19} watts/m^2$ – another way to look at that flux is that it represents 400+ kg! of mass per square meter per second! I propose that results like this suggest that matter itself can be made of nothing but elaborate patterns of gravitational structures. Clearly, high-frequency gravitational structures can hold an incredible amount of energy.

Another way of thinking about this result is that anytime a better telescope is built, or one is built that looks at a new wavelength, field or pattern of signals, those signals are not only discovered, they produce deep new insights about our universe. The fact that HFGWs are hard to detect does not mean that they are not there! Indeed, instead of calculating what the flux of HFGWs might be around us, we should instead admit our ignorance and calculate what we don’t know. Huge amounts of gravitational wave energy could be whipping by everything right now and we would not know a thing about it.

It’s going to be a quick few days in London!

–Tom

So Leonard Susskind publishes a paper on arXiv

# Dear Qubitzers, GR=QM

Which of course is what I have been saying all along. Of course Susskind’s paper is actually ‘of course’ not about QM emerging from GR, which is what I believe, and have good reason to follow up on.

Dear Qubitzers,
GR=QM? Well why not? Some of us already accept ER=EPR [1], so why not follow it to
its logical conclusion? It is said that general relativity and quantum mechanics are separate subjects that don’t fit together comfortably. There is a tension, even a contradiction between them—or so one often hears. I take exception to this view. I think that exactly the opposite is true. It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing, but those of us who are paying attention, may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.

The ‘paper’ (perhaps letter is a better name), has made the rounds/  Not Even Wrong,

Instead of that happening, it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end.

While Woit’s nemesis Lubos Motl,

Susskind also says lots of his usual wrong statements resulting from a deep misunderstanding of quantum mechanics – e.g. that "quantum mechanics is the same as a classical simulation of it". A classical system, a simulation or otherwise, can never be equivalent to a quantum mechanical theory. The former really doesn't obey the uncertainty principle, allows objective facts; the latter requires an observer and is a framework to calculate probabilities of statements that are only meaningful relatively to a chosen observer's observations.

Sabine Hossenfelder put it visually on Twitter:

My take is about the same as these popular bloggers. Don’t really think much of it.

Except the title. QM can, I believe, emerge from Einstein’s General Relativity, in much the same way that Bush and Couder’s bouncing drops can display quantum behaviour.

Its ridiculous that 11 dimensions and sparticles have hundreds of times more study than fundamental emergent phenomena. Emergence is the way to go forward. You don’t need a new force/particle/dimension/brane to make fundamentally new physics from what we already have in electromagnetism and general relativity.

See the search links on the side of this blog for some recent papers in these areas.

As someone pointed out on reddit, it looks like an inelastic collision.

Singularities, de Broglie and emergent quantum mechanics comes to mind for me.

The interaction causes a wave to propagate. After a time equal to the period of a wave on the ring, it separates into two.

https://file.scirp.org/pdf/ACES_2013100819104983.pdf

### The Atomic World Spooky? It Ain’t Necessarily So!: Emergent Quantum Mechanics, How the Classical Laws of Nature Can Conspire to Cause Quantum-Like Behaviour

The hardcover is out – for example here: Amazon.com  or at Springerbut its coming out in paperback soon – Amazon.ca . Its not coming in paperback, so I just bought the hard cover. Its ok if a paperback comes later but I can’t wait!

So what I’m saying is that I’m cheap enough to wait for the paperback, so I actually have not read the book, but it looks like its going to be a real addition to the field. Its aimed at people with at least a science background.

The book takes the discovery (by for example Couder/Bush) that quantum-like behaviour is not solely reserved to atomic particles one step further. If electrons are modelled as vibrating droplets instead of the usually assumed point objects, and if the classical laws of nature are applied, then exactly  the same behaviour  as in quantum  theory is found, quantitatively correct! The world of atoms is strange and quantum mechanics, the theory of this world, is almost magic. Or is it? Tiny droplets of oil bouncing round on a fluid surface can also mimic the world of quantum mechanics. For the layman – for whom the main part of this book is written – this is good news. If the everyday laws of nature can conspire to show up quantum-like phenomena, there is hope to form mental pictures how the atomic world works.

Here is an excerpt from the Preface to the book: (other tidbits can be downloaded from Springer)

To begin with a warning: the contents of this book may be controversial.

The readers the author had in mind when writing this book are interested laymen, typically the kind of reader who searches bookshops for the latest popular-scientific books on developments in cosmology, on recently found fun- damental particles, or on the ever more magical findings of quantum physics. These readers presumably have some background of classical school physics (although most of it may have been forgotten). It is the kind of reader who does not like to be bothered with formulae or is even allergic to them, but who has the interest and tenacity to read sentences twice if necessary. But complete novices in the matters of the atomic world should be warned: the stories told in this book are not the same as usually found in books about quantum phenomena. This book does not give the conventional explanations. In order to read the usual stories, it is better to start in

one of the many other popular-scientific books.
What then is this book about? This book certainly does not pretend to contain a

new theory of quantum mechanics, nor does it have the intention. Quantum theory in its present form is an almost perfect tool to calculate the behaviour of elementary particles. But the theory is “strange”, it is not something that intuitively can be understood. What this book tries to add are visualisations or mental pictures, closer to the intuition, because they are based on classical physics. However, the mental pictures in this book are not just half-baked analogies or metaphores, they are solidly founded on a large body of mathematical theory (for the diehards: the theory can be found in the appendix). This aspect makes this book different from other popular-scientific books.
Here is an excerpt from the book’s appendix. You can see that a mathematical treatment is supplied. This book is written for people who already know QM. I can think of some young physics undergrads I might buy this for!
I will do an in depth review when I’m able to get the book.
–Tom Andersen

I have been reading up on the trans-Planckian problem with the black hole evaporation process.

##### Here is the problem.

An observer far away from a black hole sees photons of normal infared or radio wave energies coming from a black hole (i.e. << 1eV). If one calculates the energies that these photons should have once they are in the vicinity of the black hole horizon, the energy is becomes high – higher than the Planck energy, exponentially so. Of course if we ride with the photon down to the horizon, the photon blue shifts like mad, going ‘trans-Planckian’ – i.e. having more energy than the Planck energy.

Looked at another way: if a photon starts out at the horizon, then we won’t ever see it as a distant observer. So it needs to start out just above the horizon where the distance from the horizon is given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and propagate to us. The problem is that the energy of these evaporating photons must be enormous at this quantum distance from the horizon – not merely enormous, but exponentially enormous. A proper analysis actually starts the photon off in the formation of the black hole, but the physics is the same.

Adam Helfer puts it well in his paper. Great clear writing and thinking.

#### Trans–Planckian modes, back–reaction, and the Hawking process

My take is simple. After reading Hefler’s paper plus others on the subject, I’m fairly convinced that black holes of astrophysical size (or even down to trillions of tons) do not evaporate.

### The math is good. The physics isn’t

Lets get things straight here: the math behind Hawking evaporation is good: Hawking’s math for black hole evaporation is not in question.

It should be emphasized that the problems uncovered here are entirely physical, not mathematical. While there are some technical mathematical concerns with details of Hawking’s computation, we do not anticipate any real difficulty in resolving these (cf. Fredenhagen and Haag 1990). The issues are whether the physical assumptions underlying the mathematics are correct, and whether the correct physical lessons are being drawn from the calculations.

Yet Hawking’s prediction of black hole evaporation is one of the great predictions of late 20th century physics.

Whether black holes turn out to radiate or not, it would be hard to overstate the significance of these papers. Hawking had found one of those key physical systems which at once bring vexing foundational issues to a point, are accessible to analytic techniques, and suggest deep connections between disparate areas of physics. (Helfer, A. D. (2003). Do black holes radiate? Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0304042.pdf)

So its an important concept. In fact it so important that much of not only black hole physics but quantum gravity and cosmology all use or even depend on black hole evaporation. Papers with titles like “Avoiding the Trans-Planckian Problem in Black Hole Physics” abound.

### The trans-Planckian problem is indicative of the state of modern physics.

There are so many theories in physics today that rely on an unreasonable extrapolation of the efficacy of quantum mechanics at energies and scales that are not merely larger than experimental data, but exponentially larger than we have experimental evidence for. Its like that old joke about putting a dollar into a bank account and waiting a million years – even at a few per cent interest your money will be worth more than the planet. A straightforward look at history shows that currency and banks live for hundreds of years – not millions. The same thing happens in physics – you can’t connect two reasonable physical states through an unphysical one and expect it to work.

The trans-Planckian problem is replicated perfectly in inflationary big bang theory.

The trans-Planckian problem seems like a circle the wagons type of situation in physics. Black hole evaporation now has too many careers built on it to be easily torn down.

Torn down:

To emphasize the essential way these high–frequency modes enter, suppose we had initially imposed an ultraviolet cut–off Λ on the in–modes. Then we should have found no Hawking quanta at late times, for the out–modes’ maximum frequency would be ∼ v′(u)Λ, which goes to zero rapidly. (It is worth pointing out that this procedure is within what may be fairly described as text–book quantum field theory: start with a cut–off, do the calculation, and at the very end take the cut–off to infinity. That this results in no Hawking quanta emphasizes the delicacy of the issues. In this sense, the trans–Planckian problem may be thought of as a renormalization–ambiguity problem.)

Some may argue that other researchers have solved the trans-Planckian problem, but its just too simple a problem to get around.

One way around it – which I assume is what many researchers think – is that quantum mechanics is somehow different than every other physical theory ever found, in that it has no UV, IR, no limits at all. In my view that is extremely unlikely. Quantum mechanics has limits, like every other theory.

##### Possible limits of quantum mechanics:
• Zero point: Perhaps there is a UV cut – ( Λ ) . The quantum vacuum cannot create particles of arbitrarily large energies.
• Instant collapse. While its an experimental fact that QM has non-local connections, the actual speed of these connections is only tested to a few times the speed of light.
• Quantum measurement – Schrödinger’s cat is as Schrödinger initially intended it to be seen – as an illustration of the absurdity of QM in macroscopic systems.

If there is a limit on quantum mechanics – that QM is like any other theory – a tool that works very well in some domain of physical problems, then many many pillars of theoretical physics will have to tumble, black hole evaporation being one of them.

##### Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu, and William G. Unruh

How the huge energy of quantum vacuum gravitates to drive the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe

It (I will call the paper WZU) has been discussed at several places:

Phys.org,

Sabine Hossenfelder at the Backreaction blog,

So why talk about it more here?

Well because its an interesting paper, and I think that many of the most interesting bits have been ignored or misunderstood (I’m talking here about actual physicists not the popular press articles).

For instance here are two paragraphs from Sabine Hossenfelder

Another troublesome feature of their idea is that the scale-factor of the oscillating space-time crosses zero in each cycle so that the space-time volume also goes to zero and the metric structure breaks down. I have no idea what that even means. I’d be willing to ignore this issue if the rest was working fine, but seeing that it doesn’t, it just adds to my misgivings.


So with the first paragraph, Sabine is talking about the a(t, x) factor in the metric (see equation 23 in the paper). I think that she could be a little more up front here: a(t, x) goes to zero alright, but only in very small regions of space for very short times (I’ll come back to that later). So in reality the average of the a(t,x) over any distance/time Planck scale or larger determines an almost flat, almost Lambda free universe -> average(a(t,x)) –> the a(t) as per a FLRW metric. I guess Sabine is worried about those instants when there are singularities in the solution. I agree with the answer to this supplied in the paper:

It is natural for a harmonic os- cillator to pass its equilibrium point a(t,x) = 0 at maximum speed without stopping. So in our solution, the singularity immediately disappears after it forms and the spacetime continues to evolve without stopping. Singularities just serve as the turning points at which the space switches.

...(technical argument which is not all that complicated)...

In this sense, we argue that our spacetime with singularities due to the metric becoming degenerate (a = 0) is a legitimate solution of GR.

As I said, more on that below when we get to my take on this paper.

The second paragraph above from the Backreaction blog concerns the fact that the paper authors used semi classical gravity to derive this result.

The other major problem with their approach is that the limit they work in doesn’t make sense to begin with. They are using classical gravity coupled to the expectation values of the quantum field theory, a mixture known as ‘semi-classical gravity’ in which gravity is not quantized. This approximation, however, is known to break down when the fluctuations in the energy-momentum tensor get large compared to its absolute value, which is the very case they study.

They are NOT using a classical gravity coupled to the expectation values of the quantum field theory. Indeed, according to WZU and the mathematics of the paper they say:

In this paper, we are not trying to quantize gravity. Instead, we are still keeping the spacetime metric a(t, x) as classical, but quantizing the fields propagating on it. The key difference from the usual semiclassical gravity is that we go one more step—instead of assuming the semiclassical Einstein equation, where the curvature of the spacetime is sourced by the expectation value of the quantum field stress energy tensor, we also take the huge fluctuations of the stress energy tensor into account. In our method, the sources of gravity are stochastic classical fields whose stochastic properties are determined by their quantum fluctuations.

So I think that she has it wrong. In her reply to my comment on here blog she states that its still semiclassical gravity as they use the expectation values of the fluctuations (they don’t as you can see by the quote above or better by looking at the paper. See how the equation 29 talks about expectation values, but the actual solution does not use them ). She concludes her comment: “Either way you put it, gravity isn’t quantized.” I think that’s also fair appraisal of  the attitude of many people on reading this paper many people don’t like it because gravity is treated classically.

## Why I think the paper is interesting.

#### Gravity is not quantized: get over it

I think its interesting as their approach to connecting gravity to the quantum world is basically identical to my Fully Classical Quantum Gravity experimental proposal – namely that gravity is not quantized at all and that gravity couples directly to the sub-quantum fluctuations. Wang and co-authors apologize for the lack of a quantum theory of gravity, but that appears to me anyway as more of a consensus-towing statement than physics. Indeed, the way its shoved in at the start of section C seems like it is an afterthought.

#### (Gravitational) Singularities are no big deal

Singularities are predicted by many or (even all?) field theories in physics. In QED the technique of renormalization works to remove singularities (which are the same as infinities). In the rest of modern QFT singularities are only perhaps removed by renormalization. In other words quantum field theory blows up all by itself, without any help from other theories. Its naturally bad.

The Einstein equations have a different behaviour under singular conditions. They are completely well behaved. Its only when other fields are brought in, such as electromagnetism or quantum field theory that trouble starts. But all on their own singularities are no big deal in gravity.

So I don’t worry about the microscopic, extremely short lived singularities in WZU at all.

#### Why it’s exciting

We have WZU metric equation 23

ds2 = −dt2 +a2(t,x)(dx2 +dy2 +dz2)

a(t,x) oscillates THROUGH zero to negative, but the metric depend on a^2, so we have a positive definite metric that has some zeros. These zeros are spread out quasi periodically in space and time. If one takes two points on the manifold (Alice and Bob denoted A & B), then the distance between A and B will be equivalent to the flat space measure (I am not looking at the A and B being cosmic scale distances apart in time or space, so its almost Minkowski). Thus imagine A and B being 1 thousand km apart. The scale factor a(t, x) averages to 1.

Here is the exciting bit. While an arbitrary line (or the average of an ensemble of routes) from A -> B is measured as a thousand km, there are shorter routes through the metric. Much shorter routes. How short? Perhaps arbitrarily short. It may be that there is a vanishingly small set of paths with length ds = 0, and some number of paths with ds just greater than 0, all the way up to ‘slow paths’ that spend more time in a > 1 areas.

Imagine a thread like singularity (like a cosmic string – or better a singularity not unlike a Kerr singularity where a >> m). In general relativity such a thread is of thickness 0, and the ergo region around it also tends to zero volume. One calculation of the tension on such a gravitational singularity ‘thread’ (I use the term thread as to not get confused with string theory) come out to a value of about 0.1 Newtons. A Newton of tension on something so thin is incredible. Such a thread immersed in the WZU background will find shorter paths – paths that spend more time in areas where a << 1, these paths being much more energetically favoured. There are also very interesting effects when such gravitational thread singularities are dragged through the WZU background. I think that this might be the mechanism that creates enough action to generate electromagnetism from pure general relativity only.

A 2D slice at some time through ordinary WZU vacuum. The spots are places where a~2. The straight line from A to B has an average scale factor a of 1, while the wiggly path follows a ~ 0 and hence has an average scale factor of << 1. Note that these short paths are not unique, and there is little constraint for them to be even approximately straight.

So these thread singularities thread their way through the frothy WZU metric and as such the distance a single such thread may measure between Alice and Bob may be far far less than the flat space equivalent.

It seems to me that one could integrate the metric as given in WZU equation 23 with a shortest path condition and come up with something. Here is one possible numerical way: start out with a straight thread from A to B. Then relax the straight line constraint, assign a tension to the thread, and see what the length of the thread after a few thousand iterations, where at each iteration, each segment allows itself to move toward a lower energy state (i.e. thread contraction).

This opens up:

##### Quantum non-locality

Realist, local quantum mechanics is usually thought of requiring  on having some dependency on non-local connections, as quantum experiments have shown. This shortcut path may be an answer to the need for non-local connections between particles, i.e. a mechanism for entaglement, a mechanism for Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”.

##### Faster than light communication.

Its always fun to see if there are realistic methods where one might beat the speed limit on light. It seems that worm hole traversal has been one of the favourites to date. I think that the WZU paper points at another mechanism – the fact that there exist shorter paths through the sub-quantum general relativistic froth of WZU. How might one construct a radio to do this? Entangled particles, particles that follow the zeros of a(t, x) preferentially, etc etc. One could imagine a brute force method to test this where huge pulses of energy are transmitted through space at random intervals. Perhaps a precursor signal could be measured at the detector, where some of the energy takes a short path through the WZU metric.

An interesting popular article that I found in Quantum . My favourite quote:

But there’s another view — one that’s been around for almost a century — in which particles really do have precise positions at all times. This alternative view, known as pilot-wave theory or Bohmian mechanics,

##### New Support for Alternative Quantum View

An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe.

I really like this graphic – visit the story for more!
Emergent quantum mechanics comes in many forms: stochastic electrodynamics ( Ana María Cetto) , de Broglie – Bohmian mechanics (John W M Bush) , thermal models ( Gerhard Groessing ) etc. In many of these forms of emergent quantum mechanics, particles have a physical existence and experience sub quantal movement. The paper I have just posted looks at the gravitational consequences of this sub quantal motion. An interesting finding is that while a classical Bohr hydrogen atom has a lifetime of about 10^-11 seconds, it would take that same atom 10^40 seconds or so to radiate away a few eV of energy. This indicates that the stability of the atoms is not an indication that gravity needs to be quantized, which is antithetical to Einstein in 1916:
• “…Nevertheless, due to the inner-atomic movement of electrons, atoms would have to radiate not only electro-magnetic but also gravitational energy, if only in tiny amounts. As this is hardly true in Nature, it appears that quantum theory would have to modify not only Maxwellian electrodynamics, but also the new theory of gravitation.” – Einstein, 1916
Einstein it would seem was wrong on the gravtitational side of this.
The paper looks at possible ways to see these tiny emissions (nuclear scale emissions are higher) and thus lays out a quantum gravity experiment achievable with today’s technology.

The experimental parameter space. Most important thing to note is that this is a quantum gravity experiment with an achievable parameter space!

Here is the paper…

Also see these references…

Memory effect of the Kerr response to GW wave bombardment. At resonance, we have the deBroglie fundamental frequency, (i.e. compton) and after being hit with a GW, the Kerr will re-radiate with memory. Memory like in Couder.

So this memory effect combined with energy absorption and re-radiation IS QM.

Kerr ring has two frequency bands. EM band is high frequency exchange in the linear region of the singularity line, while compton – deBroglie frequency is QM.

I have written an app that detects cosmic rays on your iOS device. Its called Cosmic Ray App, its at http://cosmicrapapp.com and it actually seems to work! Get it at the app store.

Details on signal processing can be found here.

In this two page paper, I look at how the relationship between the dimensions of a Kerr singularity and the strength of the electric Coulomb effect compare.

An arXiv paper by M. Chiaberge, et al.   The puzzling radio-loud QSO 3C 186: a gravitational wave recoiling black hole in a young radio source? concludes that a 3e9 solar mass black hole was ejected at a speed of 2000km/sec by the action of gravitational waves.

The story was recently highlighted in the press:

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the centre of the galaxy where it formed. They reckon the huge object was created when two galaxies merged and was then ejected by gravitational waves.

The discovery centres on galaxy 3C186, which lies about eight billion light-years from Earth and contains an extremely bright object that astronomers believe is a black hole weighing about one billion Suns. Most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain such supermassive black holes at their cores, with these huge, bright objects being powered by radiation given off by matter as it accelerates into the black hole.

#### A Maximal Gravitational Wave Effect

It looks like the ejected hole was quite efficiently ‘tractor beamed’ to its ejection velocity by the gravitational wave emission.

The calculations are quite simple here, at least to an first approximation. There is a black hole formed of total mass 3 billion solar masses (using the arXiv paper as a source for all calculations). Since a solar mass black hole has a Schwarzschild radius of 3 km, that makes for a object diameter of about 18 billion km, which is also of order of the wavelength of the waves involved in a gravitational merger.

The merger time when 80% of the energy is released is roughly 100 M for two holes of mass M merging, we have M = 1.5e9 solar masses, so the light travel time is about 1.5e9*3km/3e8meters/sec or 16,000 seconds is M in this case. 100 M is the time where all the energy comes out – AKA the chirp.

So about 1,600,000 seconds is the relevant time. (For GW150914 that LIGO saw the same time would be 0.03 seconds – the holes were only 30 solar masses).

A total interaction time of 20 days. So the black hole is accelerated to a speed of 2000km/sec over 1,600,000 seconds. Thats an acceleration of 1 m/sec^2, or about 1/10 of earths gravity – funny how the numbers work out to be an acceleration that is an understandable number. The force is huge: F = ma  or 1 x10^40 newtons. The total kinetic energy is KE = 1/2 (3e9 solar masses)*(2000km/s)^2, 1.2×10^52 J.

From a conservation of momentum we can get the total momentum of the gw  E/c = (3e9 solar masses)*(2000km/s) –> 10^54 J of gw energy, this much energy was in a region about 18 billion km wide, say 1,600,000 seconds long, so an average of 1e13 J/metre^3, with a peak likely 5x that. We have an h for that from a typical expression for energy in a gravitational wave:  so h = sqrt(32*pi*G*tGW/(w**2c**2)).

Wolfram shows h as 0.8 for these values (h can not be bigger than 1, anything over 0.1 means you need to use full non linear to get accurate results). In other words the math points to some sort of maximal connection – the gravitational waves must have been very connected to the structure. Gravitational waves while only weakly connected to something like LIGO are very strongly connected – a high coupling constant – to areas with large curvature.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt(32*pi*G*(1.7e13J%2F(metre%5E3))%2F((1e-6%2Fsecond)%5E2*c%5E2)

This is already known in the land of GR. My idea is that particles expose areas of very large curvature (naked singularities) and hence also couple extremely well to gravitational waves. Well enough that we can construct electromagnetism as an emergent phenomena of GR.

Ian Sample has a 38 min talk with Gerard t’Hooft about a paper he presented at EmQM2011 in Vienna. The EmQM conference is held every two years, in 2015 I presented a poster called Can a sub-quantum medium be provided by General Relativity?. He also chats with Kings College London’s Dr Eleanor Knox, for some historical perspective, and Professor Carlo Rovelli for a bit about the, relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Ian writes

The 20th century was a golden one for science. Big bang cosmology, the unravelling of the genetic code of life, and of course Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But it also saw the birth of quantum mechanics – a description of the world on a subatomic level – and unlike many of the other great achievements of the century, the weird world of quantum physics remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago. But what if strange quantum behaviour emerged from familiar, classical physics? How would this alter our view of the quantum world? And, more importantly, what would it tell us about the fundamental nature of reality?

Some notes while listening…

1min The Podcast starts off with Feynman’s guess snippet. Which is as funny as it is right.

2min That is followed by a very short well known (to quantum mechanics like us) intro to quantum mechanics.

4min Then – Ian actually uses the words ‘Emergent Quantum Mechanics’!

5-7min Gerard talks about the accuracy and weirdness of quantum mechanics.

8min Gerard  – “Classical Physics is an approximation.” – not incompatible.

8min Ian brings out ‘God does not play dice’.

9min Knox – talks about the measurement problem. The collapse. The Copenhagen Interpretation.

10min Knox talks about emergent theories – like biology, thermodynamics. So is quantum mechanics emergent? – Will EmQM help with the measurement problem?

13min Gerard – perhaps the randomness of QM does arise from stochastic classical actions. The answer is no – its not classical – “its different to its bones” from classical. Its a fundamental difference. (i.e. Bell).

15min Gerard talks about the Standard Model of Particle Physics. – Lots of people think that is all we need.

16min Gerard says the SM+QM does not feel right. It lacks a certain internal logic. Gerard thinks that the laws of QM are something of an optical illusion, ‘what is it actually that we are describing’.

17min Gerard does not want to change the equations of QM. He keeps the equations of QM. (Tom says this is at odds with most EmQM practitioners today).

18-22min Ian asks if EmQM is controversial. Gerard says yes its controversial. Bell proves that its impossible to have a classical computer reproduce QM. But Gerard has looked at the small print, and finds a way around the Bell theorem – by long range correlations – linked. This correlation is the heart of QM and is not weird – but needs a natural explanation.

22min Ian asks if this solves ‘Spooky action at a distance’. Gerard says yes it does these correlations can explain these peculiar correlations.

23min Ian says Knox calls Gerards plan ‘superdeterminism’.

25min Ian asks why do we need to change QM if it works so well? Gerard says the positive outlook on QM as being exactly correct is the Many World Interpretation. Gerard finds MWI ‘unsatisfactory’.

26min Ian points out that Gerard and EmQM are controversial.

27min Ian talks to Carlo Rovelli.

28min Carlo says we need to get used to QM – it will not be explained or overturned soon. The weakness in EmQM’s are that they do not lead to ‘new ways of thinking’ (Tom says what??). Then he talks about String theory and QM. We should just accept it as is.

30min Ian talks to Gerard about being comfortable with a theory that like QM. Gerard says that the present situation is bad with the MWI multiverse. Gerard thinks that while this works its ‘unsatisfactory’.

31min Gerard – the MWI shows that we are not there yet. We have not found the right description for our universe. All we have today are templates – that is our description, but its not what it actually is.

34min Carlo – his relational theory. Which is not MWI. Take QM seriously, relational QM takes QM at face value. The properties of objects are always measured with respect to something else. Velocity is the property of an object relative to something else.

36min Carlo starts talking about quantum gravity. We need to use relational QM to help us get to quantum gravity.

37min Science is a long sequence of us discovering that we were wrong. The world is different. If we end up agreeing on QM then this changes realism and philosophy – which Carlo thinks that will be the case. QM is the final theory for him.

#### Dark Matter – cuspy core problem.

Proposed solution is that dark matter wakes up, turns into matter and then self repels/forms stars, etc.This means no cusp is found.

Note how in the most tenuous gas clouds (well cold ones – the hot tenuous galactic halo does not count as its a supernova effect), the density is the exact same as the dark matter density?

From https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1938.pdf – note how dark matter is about about 0.2 protons per cm^3 (BR 13 measurement) . One would think that in the disk of the milky way, this close to the galactic core that the DM density is about as large as it gets. Which seems right:

The Dark Matter Halo of the Milky Way, AD 2013 – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.5127v2.pdf

We find that the cored profile is the preferred one, with a shallow central density of ρH ∼ 4 × 107M⊙/kpc3 and a large core radius RH ∼ 10kpc, as observed in external spirals and in agreement with the mass model underlying the Universal Rotation Curve of spirals.

From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium

Note how the lowest density clouds are 0.2 – 0.5 protons/cm^3

Why is this the same density? Answer: The dark matter has a maximum density, if density gets higher it lights up and turns into protons/electrons/H – which results in WIM and WNM clouds. Dark matter might be sleeping matter.

#### There is a problem – what heats the Warm Ionized Medium?

Journal, T. A. (2000). EVIDENCE FOR AN ADDITIONAL HEAT SOURCE IN THE WARM IONIZED MEDIUM OF GALAXIES, (Rand 1998), 1997–2000.

Dark Matter waking up might naturally result in WIM over WNM.

Update:

You can see a clear (well kinda clear -its astronomy data…) cut at 0.04 electrons (ie protons too) per cm3. http://www.astro.wisc.edu/wham/papers-dir/hill_sins.pdf

To me this is exciting. WIM has a density wall at about 0.02 particles / cm3 – while dark matter has a density of about the same number (within a factor of 10).

The maximum density of dark matter is about equal to the low-density wall of WIM.

Dark matter does not exist at high densities. So on a galaxy rotation curve, ie

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/566/1/012008/pdf

ie – right at about the 15 kPc mark. Dark matter really not needed much below 10 kPc at all. Dark matter turns into regular matter at about these distances. Clumps of regular matter (which is how they get the rotation curves) are centers for DM – regular matter promotion. This promotion results in anomalous heating of the WIM.

Also see: – the ionizing problem is still around. The O star theory seems kinda weak…

http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~ay216/08/NOTES/Lecture08-08.pdf

Thus O stars are able to ionize the WIM (other obvious sources of Ionizing radiation are weaker), but how do the ionizing photons get from the location of these stars in the thin disk of the Milky Way to far above the mid-plane?

–Tom

#### Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism

Its quite reasonably done. Host Dr. Matt O’Dowd takes a 15 min tour through the history of the theory, mentioning John von Neumann, David Bohm, Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr and others. The basics are there and the level is a large step higher than TV, making it good to watch even if you know all the basics already. Since 90% of popular physics over the past decade has been on strings and the multiverse, I feel its great when a theory that actually has a possibility to be correct gets some air time, so that’s why I am mentioning it here.

Matt mentions this video by Veritasium which has 1.3 million views! I thought QM interpretations was a backwater in the physics backwater, but its seems not always.

Matt has an account at patreon here where you can catch up with other PBS video https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime , and Veritasium has one here https://www.patreon.com/veritasium .

While I’m not sure myself that the EM drive actually works, the authors of the recently published EM Drive paper promote a realist interpretation of QM in order to explain the EM Drive’s thrust.

In the approach used in the quantum vacuum plasma thruster (also known as a Q thruster) supporting physics models, the zero point field (ZPF) plays the role of the guiding wave in a similar manner to the vacuum-based pilot-wave theories. To be specific, the vacuum fluctuations (virtual fermions and virtual photons) serves as the dynamic medium that guides a real particle on its way.
......
If the vacuum is indeed mutable and degradable as was explored, then it might be possible to do/extract work on/from the vacuum, and thereby be possible to push off of the quantum vacuum and preserve the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum.

#### Is this publicity a good or bad thing?

This widely distributed paper puts the ideas of realist interpretations of QM in the news, as evidenced by articles here, here and here. That’s good in my opinion, as more eyes on the field, the better. Some may think that conflating the EM Drive with an emergent quantum mechanics will only harm the field once the EM Drive is put to rest in a few more years, but that’s not how publicity works.

#### My take on the EM Drive

There has been a lot of action about these drives over the past decade or two. I am totally open to new ‘unexplained’ physics, but one wonders why this phenomena has not been experimentally accepted after all this time and energy. For reference’s sake, a long awaited upheaval of physics may come from an unexplained yet established result along these lines, but Kuhn’s ideas suggest that well established theories can explain any result, and so we may instead have to look for theories that provide simpler explanations for established experimental results.

a) Quantum Mechanics emerges from General Relativity.

b) The Cosmic Censorship Conjecture is wrong.

Since the physical behavior of singularities is unknown, if singularities can be observed from the rest of spacetime, causality may break down, and physics may lose its predictive power. The issue cannot be avoided, since according to the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, singularities are inevitable in physically reasonable situations. Still, in the absence of naked singularities, the universe, as described by the general theory of relativity, is deterministic [1] —it is possible to predict the entire evolution of the universe (possibly excluding some finite regions of space hidden inside event horizons of singularities), knowing only its condition at a certain moment of time (more precisely, everywhere on a spacelike three-dimensional hypersurface, called the Cauchy surface). Failure of the cosmic censorship hypothesis leads to the failure of determinism, because it is yet impossible to predict the behavior of spacetime in the causal future of a singularity. Cosmic censorship is not merely a problem of formal interest; some form of it is assumed whenever black hole event horizons are mentioned.

The above description is more or less the way that its viewed today.

If like me, you think that Cosmic Censorship is false, then the above reads as to how fundamentally acausal – ‘truly random’ events can emerge from a purely geometric universe. This does not sound like a catastrophe at all. It sounds like nature.

The Kerr solution plainly admits a > m . The number of papers trying to figure out how a > m cannot exist far surpasses the ones that simply explore the consequences of a > m naked singularities. These over spinning Kerr singularities are in fact fairly benign it turns out as they are impossible to hit unless one shoots a test particle along the exact equator – a set of measure zero. (Carter 1968).

Many of the papers concerning the non existence of a > m use a thought experiment along the lines of ‘starting with a ~= m, toss in a rock so that it looks like a > m will be the result’. They then go to great lengths to show that back reaction, etc will keep a <= m.  That misses the point. There are also ways to construct a naked Kerr ring using wholistic methods like collapsing rings of matter, or colliding gravitational waves. Thus a > m can happen. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05174 for example.

Get over it. Kerr spinning a > m solutions likely exist in nature.

Hawking and Ellis, in The LargeScale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge 1973)

#### Abstract

We posit that the de Broglie wave as a real physical wave produced by interactions between any massive particle and the gravitational background zero point field.

de Broglie waves are tied to momentum. They are associated with any free particle. For instance an electron or a Buckyball.  In my view they are some sort of beat phenomenon – doppler effect.

There is a huge background of Gravitational waves at some very large frequency – (perhaps Planckian).

How physically would waves associate with every single mass ? The only possible coupling is through mass itself.  So what is the result of something the mass of an electron on a homogenous gravitational wave background?

The mass will distort the background wave pattern.

From this distortion would come some sort of interference pattern. Think of the rubber mat analogy. There would be a dent for the electron in a sea of waves. Would this effect a much much lower frequency effect – de Broglie waves -?

If we take the mass of the particle as m, and the frequency of the background waves as 1.85e43 Hz. Perhaps this gives us the ‘dark energy’, along with quantum guidance rules.

#### Introduction

The de Broglie wave is a wave that can be used to predict the quantum behaviour of particles. Its a wavelength that is tied to momentum.

The de Broglie wavelength is the wavelength, λ, associated with a massive particle and is related to its momentum, p, through the Planck constant, h:
$\lambda ={\frac {h}{p}}.$

This wave seems puzzling. Its tied to momentum, so for an observers travelling with different velocities will measure different de Broglie wavelengths. This is often taken as an indication of the non – reality of these waves. But there is a simple explanation for this – and its based on special relativity.

#### de Broglie beats and the Compton frequency:

"de Broglie made a second, less well known conjecture. If you combine
the E=mc2 and the E=hf equations (where f is frequency), you arrive
at the Compton frequency. de Broglie's conjecture was that the
Compton frequency reflected, in the case of the electron (quarks
were not yet discovered), some kind of fundamental intrinsic
oscillation or circulation of charge associated with the electron.
However it is now known that this presumed oscillation can also be
interpreted instead as being externally driven by the zero-point
fluctuations of the quantum vacuum (see chap. 12 of the monograph
"The Quantum Dice" by de la Pena and Cetto).

Now comes a very intriguing result. One can easily show that if the
electron really does oscillate at the Compton frequency in its own rest
frame, when you view the electron from a moving frame a beat frequency
becomes superimposed on this oscillation due to a Doppler shift. It turns
out that this beat frequency proves to be exactly the de Broglie wavelength of a moving electron." http://www.calphysics.org/mass.html

There is still a problem though. The de Broglie relationship holds for any object, experimentally measured up to a Buckyball with hundreds of component particles. Thus the de Broglie wavelength is some effect of mass combined with motion. The only effect that mass has on a purely classical geometric world is the Schwarzschild ‘indent’ on the background space time.

So how can an indent give rise to a beat frequency?

This result may be generalized to include ZPF radiation from all other directions, as
may be found in the monograph of de la Pena and Cetto [5]. They conclude by stating:
“The foregoing discussion assigns a physical meaning to de Broglie’s wave: it is the mod-ulation of the wave formed by the Lorentz-transformed, Doppler-shifted superposition of the whole set of random stationary electromagnetic waves of frequency ωC with which the electron interacts selectively.”

Assume some white noise like stochastic gravitational wave spectrum as a background on that exists everywhere in the universe (as it undoubtedly does, with only the amplitude unknown). What is the result of viewing a truncated Schwarzschild solution moving (say slowly to ease the math at first) through this background?

One would expect lensing of this stochastic field. The field will refract modes that match its characteristic size. This size scales to its mass. First consider a particle at rest with respect to the observer. With the dent this causes in space time we see a time dilation which affects the waves cumulatively, causing an internal Compton frequency – which is a result of the

$\nu ={\frac {mc^2}{h}}.$

Another solution as explained by Rober Schuler

There is an obvious heuristic, however, which provides the needed frequency sum to a good
approximation. We need only assume that, like Schrödinger waves, de Broglie waves are related to the probability of finding a particle. Let p(A) be the probability of finding A, and p(B) the probability of finding B, and assume these meanings continue to hold if A and B are bound together. One of the interesting aspects of de Broglie’s paper (actually his thesis, which was printed in a journal), is a section treating bound particles where both are considered to be moving. [Ibid. 12] By contrast, when using Schrödinger’s analysis, stationary confinement boundaries and potentials are used (which would be associated with particles, e.g. a stationary nucleus, that have infinite de Broglie wavelength). Since we are only able to find the bound pair AB if we find both A and B, then the probability of finding AB must be p(AB) = p(A)p(B). If “p” is a sinusoidal function, then indeed the product of two such functions reduces by a common trig identity to a term involving the sum of the frequencies of p(A) and p(B), and a term involving their difference. The sum frequency corresponds perfectly to the frequency of the sum of the masses of A and B.
The only problem is what to do with the difference frequency? Wignall’s method was speculative, and we can’t use it anyway because he was not using probability, but complex valued functions. However, as an approximation we can observe two things. First, in the case of common nuclear particles, whether we treat them as hadrons (protons, neutrons), or quarks, the masses are approximately the same and the difference frequencies are therefore approximately zero. Second, in the case of the binding of electrons to a nucleus, the electron mass is to a good approximation negligible. It

Once this relationship is obtained, the de Broglie matter waves are a necessary conclusion, as the literature indicates.

So one is left with the task of showing that any truncated Schwarzschild solution will cause an internal frequency – a mode trap – when its sitting in a stochastic gravitational field.

The next step

Assume standing GR waves (in well defined the universal rest frame). 1.85e43 Hz. Then there is a Schwarzschild solution sitting in that standing wave bath.

Time dilation lapse function sqrt(1- 2M/r) becomes simply 1-M/r unless you are within 1e-30m of an electron. So that is the lapse function. What beat frequency does our planckian background generate ? – The compton frequency. Redshift.

Take equation for z (r -> inf) and mult by the huge planck frequency. You then get the compton frequency. Solve the equation for the radius of the electron and get the planck length. (But this requires that the electron is quite small and that the buckyball is even smaller! – also this calculation is for a monochromatic wave – not a stochastic background).  What about using the width of the

So that is the size of the electron. One planck size will give you a gravitational (blueshift from outside) of the compton electron frequency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/re
st_v1/media/math/render/svg/d50a640dc99823e7f650b0c2580ec3bc51ea7ddd

#### de Broglie

The proton de Broglie frequency is about the exact same number – $2.3 x 10^23 Hz$

“He asserted that quantum mechanics was intrinsically relativistic and proposed that the pilot wave originates in internal particle oscillations at the Compton frequency, ωc =mc2/h ̄, at which rest mass energy is exchanged with wave energy. He proposed that the guiding wave field evolves according to the Klein-Gordon equation and consists of a monochromatic wave field in the particle’s frame of reference. The de Broglie relation, p = h ̄ k, then relates the particle momentum to the de Broglie wavelength, λdB = 2π/k. Finally, he stressed the importance of the harmony of phases, by which the particle’s internal vibration, seen as that of a clock, stays in phase with its guiding wave (de Broglie 1930, 1987). Thus, according to his conception, the wave and particle maintain a state of resonance.” [reference]

and try to find your friend at the other end.” — Leonard Susskind

In this talk Leonard Susskind gives a convincing argument as to why he thinks that ER == EPR , where ER denotes an Einstein – Rosen Bridge (aka wormhole) and EPR is the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper (essentially entanglement).

Leonard draws three entangled pairs of particles on the chalkboard, (image its not merely 3 by 3e40) and then collapse the left and right down to black holes, then the entaglement must continue, and thus ER == EPR

Take a ring of rotating matter.

No matter what frequency it rotates at, there is no General Relativistic waves emanating from it.

Now assume that the matter starts to clump up into two balls. NOW we have GR radiation.

Now run the camera in reverse.

What we have is an object that aggressively reflects (exchanges) GR radiation with other similar objects at the same frequency.

The rings I am talking about are the mass of an electron and very very small.