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How is that even a question?

Previous posts have all not mentioned quantum effects at all. That’s the point – we are building physics from General Relativity, so QM must be a consequence of the theory, right?

Here are some thoughts:

QM seems to not like even special relativity much at all. It is a Newtonian world view theory that has been modified to work in special relativity for the most part, and in General Relativity not at all.

There are obvious holes in QM – the most glaring of which is the perfect linearity and infinitely expandable wave function. Steven Weinberg has posted a paper about a class of QM theories that solve this problem. In essence, the solution is to say that the state vector degrades over time, so that hugely complex, timeless state vectors actually self collapse due to some mechanism. (Please read his version for his views, as my comment are from my point of view.)

If one were to look for a more physical model of QM, something along the lines of Bohm’s hidden variables, then what would we need:

Some sort of varying field that supplies ‘randomness’:

  • This is courtesy of the monopole field discussed in previous posts about the proton and the electron.

Some sort of  reason for the electron to not spiral into the proton:

  • Think De Broglie waves –  a ‘macroscopic’ (in comparison to the monopole field) wave interaction. still these waves ‘matter waves’ are closely tied to the waves that control the electromagnetic field.
  • Put another way – there is room for many forces in the GR framework, since dissimilar forces ignore each other for the most part.
  • Another way of thinking about how you talk about multidimensional information waves (hilbert spaces of millions of dimensions for example), is to note that as long as there is a reasonable mechanism for keeping these information channels separate, then there is a way to do it all with a meta field – GR.

Quantum field theory:

  • This monopole field is calculable and finite, unlike the quantum field theories of today, which are off by a factor of 10100 when trying to calculate energy densities, etc.

History has showed us that all physical theories eventually fail. The failure is always a complete failure in terms of some abstract perfectionist viewpoint, but in reality, the failure only amounts to small corrections. Take for instance gravity. Newton’s theory is absurd – gravity travels instantly, etc. But it is also simple and powerful, it predictions working well enough to put people on the Moon.

Quantum Mechanics, it would seem, has a lot of physicists claiming that ‘this time is different’ – that QM is ‘right’. Nature does play dice. There are certain details of it yet to be worked out, like how to apply it to fully generalized curvy spacetimes, etc.

Lets look at what would happen if it were wrong. Or rather, lets look at one way that it could be wrong.

QM predicts that there are chances for every event happening. I mean in the following way – there is a certain probability for an electron (say) to penetrate some sort of barrier (quantum tunneling). As the barrier is made higher and or wider, the probability of tunneling goes down according to a well defined formula: (see for example this wikipedia article). Now, the formulas for the tunneling probability do not ‘top out’ – there is a really, really tiny chance that even a slowly moving electron could make it through a concrete wall. What if this is wrong? What if there is a limit as to the size of the barrier? Or put another way – what if there is a limit to probability? Another way to look at this is to say that there is a upper limit on the half life of a compound. Of course, just as Newton’s theory holds extremely well for most physics, it may be hard to notice that there is not an unlimited amount of ‘quantum wiggle’ to ‘push’ particles through extremely high barriers.

Steven Weinberg has posted a paper about a class of theories that try to solve the measurement problem in QM by having QM fail. (It fails a little at a time, so we need big messy physics to have the wave collapse). I agree fully with his idea – that we have to modify QM to solve the measurement problem.