This brief critical review discusses attempts to check the accuracy with which experiments confirm conservation of electrical charge and the Pauli principle. The unavailability is emphasized of an internally consistent phenomenological theory which could describe a violation of charge conservation and/or of the Pauli principle. Longitudinal photons play a fundamental role in nonconservation of charge. New proposals concerning verification of the Pauli principle are discussed.
This brief critical review discusses attempts to check the accuracy with which experiments confirm conservation of electrical charge and the Pauli principle. The unavailability is emphasized of an internally consistent phenomenological theory which could describe a violation of charge conservation and/or of the Pauli principle. Longitudinal photons play a fundamental role in nonconservation of charge. New proposals concerning verification of the Pauli principle are discussed.
The present experimental tests have proved high precisely the validity of the Pauli exclusion principle (PEP) in usual cases. The future experiments should be combined widely with various theories of hidden and obvious violation of PEP. Author think that known experiments and theories seem to imply the violation at high energy. Some possible tests have been proposed in particle physics, nuclei at high energy and astrophysics, etc., in particular, the excited high-n atoms and multi-quark states. Moreover, the violation is possibly relevant to the nonlinear quantum theory, in which the present linear superposition principle may not hold. Finally, the possible violation at very low temperature is discussed. These experiments may be connected with tests of other basic principles, for example, the present wave property, possible decrease of entropy due to internal interactions in isolated systems, and PCT invariance, etc.
The linguistic and epistemological constraints on finding and expressing an answer to the title question are reviewed. First, it is recalled that "fields" are defined in terms of their effect on "test charges" and not in terms of any, even idealistically considered, primary, native innate qualities of their own. Thus, before fields can be discussed, the theorist has to have already available a defined "test particle" and field source. Clearly, neither the test nor the engendering particles can be defined as elements of the considered field without redefining the term "field." Further, the development of a theory as a logical structure (i.e., an internally self consistent conceptual complex) entails that the subject(s) of the theory (the primitive elements) and the rules governing their interrelationships (axioms) cannot be deduced by any logical procedure. They are always hypothesized on the basis of intuition supported by empirical experience. Given hypothesized primitive elements and axioms it is possible, in principle, to test for the 'completion' of the axiom set (i.e., any addition introduces redundancy) and for self consistency. Thus, theory building is limited to establishing the self consistency of a theory's mathematical expression and comparing that with the external, ontic world. Finally, a classical model with an event-by-event simulation of an EPR-B experiment to test a Bell Inequality is described. This model leads to a violation of Bell's limit without any quantum input (no nonlocal interaction nor entanglement), thus substantiating previous critical analysis of the derivation of Bell inequalities. On the basis of this result, it can be concluded that the electromagnetic interaction possesses no preternatural aspects, and that the usual models in terms of waves, fields and photons are all just imaginary constructs with questionable relation to a presumed reality.
The modern state of the Pauli exclusion principle is shortly discussed. We describe the discovery by Pauli, his principle for electrons, and how it was generalized for all elementary particles in the framework of quantum mechanics. The motivations and theoretical conceptions that induced the experiments for verification of the Pauli exclusion principle are analyzed. The results and methodology of two different types of experiments are discussed: (1) the search of unusual atoms and nuclei in the stable non-Pauli states, and (2) the experiments in which the emitted radiation of non-Pauli transitions is measured. In conclusion, the comments on the discussed experiments that follow from the general quantum mechanical conceptions and group theory are formulated.
Properties of observables in the Pauli and Schrödinger theories and first order relativistic approximations to them are derived from the Dirac theory. They are found to be inconsistent with customary interpretations in many respects. For example, failure to identify the ’’Darwin term’’ as the s−state spin−orbit energy in conventional treatments of the hydrogen atom is traced to a failure to distinguish between charge and momentum flow in the theory. Consistency with the Dirac theory is shown to imply that the Schrödinger equation describes not a spinless particle as universally assumed, but a particle in a spin eigenstate. The bearing of spin on the interpretation of the Schrödinger theory is discussed. Conservation laws of the Dirac theory are formulated in terms of relative variables, and used to derive virial theorems and the corresponding conservation laws in the Pauli−Schrödinger theory.
The atomic absorption and emission process that uses noninstantaneous electronic transitions of the atomic electron (i.e., electric charge), the tangent reference system, the property of speed instantaneity, and the conservation laws leads to a violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and it is maintained in the atomic absorption and emission process discontinuity that is conserved as the emitted photon's (i.e., electromagnetic radiation's) discontinuity. This leads to a falsification of Bohr's complementary principle that aligns with Einstein's 1909 falsification of it. The violation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and falsification of Bohr's complementarity principle falsify the Copenhagen interpretation, because it requires Heisenberg's uncertainty principle not to be violated and Bohr's complementarity principle not to be falsified.
The Pauli Exclusion Principle is a basic principle of Quantum Mechanics, and its validity has never been seriously challenged. However, given its fundamental standing, it is very important to check it as thoroughly as possible. Here we describe the VIP (VIolation of the Pauli exclusion principle) experiment, an improved version of the Ramberg and Snow experiment (E. Ramberg and G. Snow, {\it Phys. Lett. B} {\bf 238}, 438 (1990)); VIP has just completed the installation at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory, and aims to test the Pauli Exclusion Principle for electrons with unprecedented accuracy, down to β2/2≈10−30−10−31. We report preliminary experimental results and briefly discuss some of the implications of a possible violation.