Electromagnetism and quantum mechanics share a few crucial characteristics. First of all, both electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, separately and in unison, provide the foundations for the informational civilization we now live in. Take electromagnetism away and civilization collapses. Take quantum mechanics away and civilization crumbles. The second essential feature that both these physical phenomena share is that they function via waves and fields. Thirdly, as Freeman Dyson so insightfully indicated, both electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are configured in a two layer structure. Intangible waves and fields plus a two layer structure of understanding introduce their fourth commonality: a propensity to be misunderstood. Here, we describe how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics find a common meeting ground in the field of optics.
Electromagnetism and quantum mechanics share a few crucial characteristics. First of all, both electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, separately and in unison, provide the foundations for the informational civilization we now live in. Take electromagnetism away and civilization collapses. Take quantum mechanics away and civilization crumbles. The second essential feature that both these physical phenomena share is that they function via waves and fields. Thirdly, as Freeman Dyson so insightfully indicated, both electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are configured in a two layer structure. Intangible waves and fields plus a two layer structure of understanding introduce their fourth commonality: a propensity to be misunderstood. Here, we describe how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics find a common meeting ground in the field of optics.
For more than a century, physics has relied upon two enormously successful butphilosophically incomplete frameworks: Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Electromagnetism(EM). Quantum Mechanics provides extraordinary predictive capability at microscopicscales, yet leaves unresolved foundational questions concerning wave-particle duality,measurement, nonlocal correlations, and the apparent action-at-a-distance implied byquantum entanglement. Electromagnetism, meanwhile, accurately describes electric andmagnetic phenomena but does so within a framework that abandoned the concept of aphysically conditionable medium. As a result, EM provides mathematical description whileoffering limited explanation of how fields exist, propagate, and interact with matter at adeeper ontological level.The Space-Phase (SP3) framework proposes that space is not empty but is instead aconditionable medium possessing physical properties. Within this view, both quantumphenomena and electromagnetic phenomena emerge naturally from interactions betweenmatter, energy, and the Space-Phase medium. Apparent paradoxes become consequencesof medium behavior rather than indications of fundamental mystery. This paper examinesthe conceptual limitations of QM and EM and discusses how Space-Phase offers a unifiedexplanatory framework extending from laboratory physics to cosmological observations,includin
For more than a century, quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have been taught as fundamentally different kinds of theories: one built from a single wavefunction, the other from two real fields that generate each other. This work shows that the difference was never essential. Beneath the familiar formalism, both matter and light share the same underlying architecture: each is a real two‑component system whose parts sustain one another through first‑order propagation. In this framework, the wavefunction is not an abstract complex object but a real pair of internal quadratures selected by a physical clock axis. Maxwell’s electric and magnetic fields are another such pair, selected by the same axis and transported by the same geometric connection. The unity is not metaphorical — it is encoded directly in the action. The same internal direction that determines matter’s internal rotation also determines the electromagnetic sector that survives at long range. Nothing in this reinterpretation alters the tested predictions of quantum mechanics or electromagnetism. What changes is the meaning: phase becomes real geometry, the wavefunction becomes a two‑quadrature field, and electromagnetism emerges as the about‑axis transport of the same clock structure that governs matter. This reveals a simple, coherent propagation principle underlying two pillars of physics.
Operatoric Research CorpusStudies in World-Formation Section I Ontology and Physics Volume 2 The Ontological Limits of Physical ExplanationMeasurement, Collapse and Boundary Phenomena in Quantum Physics This volume brings together a series of contributions on the ontology of fundamental problems in physics, in particular the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function, the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity theory, as well as boundary phenomena such as black holes, renormalization, and vacuum energy. The point of departure of these investigations is the thesis that numerous paradoxes of modern physics do not primarily result from insufficient physical theories, but from a categorical misaddressing. Transitions that concern the very conditions of world stability—especially the transition from possibility to facticity—are often interpreted as dynamical processes within an already stabilized world. This gives rise to explanatory programs that attempt to bridge this boundary by means of additional mechanisms, ontologies, or informational structures. The texts collected in this volume pursue an alternative strategy. They understand the so-called collapse of the wave function not as a physical process, but as an irreversible constriction of a space of possibility through which objectivity and the direction of time first emerge at all. The concept of indimergence designates the boundary act in which possibility passes into facticity without itself being describable as an event within the world. On the basis of this determination, central approaches in the foundations of quantum mechanics—particularly dynamical collapse models, Many-Worlds interpretations, and information-theoretic ontologies—are comparatively analyzed. It becomes evident that, despite their differences, they share a common presupposition: the assumption that the transition from possibility to facticity must itself be explicable within physical description. The contributions in this volume instead propose to read the measurement problem and related paradoxes as indications of structural limits of physical description. From this perspective, other fundamental problems—such as the tension between quantum mechanics and relativity theory, the information paradoxes of black holes, or divergences in field theory—no longer appear primarily as unsolved technical puzzles, but as boundary phenomena of world formation itself. The volume therefore does not present itself as an alternative physical theory, but as an ontological clarification of the conditions under which physical theories are able to describe a world at all.
Let us return from optics to mechanics and explore the analogy to its fullest extent. In optics the old system of mechanics corresponds to intellectually operating with isolated mutually independent light rays. The new undulatory mechanics corresponds to the wave theory of light . Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel lecture , 1933 In this chapter we shall see that electromagnetic waves and electrons feature a number of common properties under conditions of spatial confinement. Simple and familiar problems from introductory quantum mechanics and textbook wave optics are recalled in this chapter to emphasize the basic features of waves in spatially inhomogeneous media. Herewith we make a first step towards understanding the properties of electrons and electromagnetic waves in nanostructures and notice that these properties in many instances are counterparts. Different formulas and statements of this chapter can be found in handbooks on quantum mechanics and wave optics. A few textbooks on quantum mechanics do consider analogies of propagation and reflection phenomena in wave optics with those in wave mechanics. Isomorphism of the Schrödinger and Helmholtz equations In Chapter 2 we discussed that an electron in quantum mechanics is described by the wave function, the square of its absolute value giving the probability of finding an electron at a specific point in space. This function satisfies the Schrödinger equation (2.56) which is the second-order differential equation with respect to space and the first-order differential equation with respect to time.
This paper has few different, but interrelated, goals. At first, we will propose a version of discretization of quantum field theory (Chapter 3). We will write down Lagrangians for sample bosonic fields (Section 3.1) and also attempt to generalize them to fermionic QFT (Section 3.2). At the same time, we will insist that the elements of our discrete space are embedded into a continuum. This will allow us to embed several different "lattices" into the same continuum and view them as separate "quantum" field configurations. Classical parameters will be used in order to specify "which lattice" each given element "belongs to". Furthermore, another set of "classical" parameters will be proposed in order to define so-called "probability amplitude" of each "field configuration", embodied by a corresponding lattice, "taking place" (Chapter 2). Apart from that, we will propose a set of "classical" signals that propagate throughout continuum, and define their dynamics in such a way that they produce the mathematical information consistent with the desired "quantum" effects within the lattices we are concerned about (Chapter 4). Finally, we will take advantage of the lack of "true" quantum mechanics, and "add" gravity in such a way that avoids the issue of its quantization altogether (Chapter 5). In the process of doing so, we will propose a gravity-based collapse model of a wave function. In particular, we will claim that the collapse of a wave function is merely a result of states that violate Einstein's equation being "thrown away". The mathematical structure of this model (in particular, the appeal to gambler's ruin) will be similar to GRW collapse models.