The weird world of the photon

John Beaver

Jeffrey H. Boyd

With a clever new interpretation of the Schrödinger equation, those quantum experiments that allegedly prove that the quantum world is weird, no longer do so. When we approach the math from an unexpected angle, experiments that appeared to prove that time can go backwards in the quantum world, no longer say that. Experiments that appeared to demonstrate that a particle can be in two places at the same time, no longer say that. This requires that we take a counter-intuitive approach to the math, rather than a counter-intuitive approach to the quantum world. QM makes sensible assumptions and discovers that the quantum world is weird. Our math from the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) makes weird assumptions and discovers that the quantum world is sensible. We pay the weirdness tax up front. QM does not pay the weirdness tax and is penalized with a permanent misperception of the quantum world. This article is paired with a lively YouTube video that explains the same thing in 18 minutes: “New Schrödinger wave mathematics changes experiments from saying there is, to denying there is quantum weirdness.” That video can be found at the website ElementaryWave.com.

Philip Ball

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world. Rather, we can now see that everything is quantum: our everyday world is simply what quantum becomes at the human scale. But if quantum mechanics is right, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seems obvious or right—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

Trevor W. Marshall, Emilio Santos

H. Kroemer

I enjoyed reading Robert P Crease's column on “Quantum guidebooks” (June pp19–20), particularly the opening sentence of the last paragraph, in which he suggests that the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics stems “not from the quantum world, but from us”.