Thread: magical photons
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Old 02-06-2020, 01:29 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

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Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
G'day Ray

Quote:
I think that about a century of history stands against any argument that quantum mechanics is fundamentally flawed as a predictive/explanatory mechanism. QM was developed after classical approaches (partly based on Maxwell's equations) failed spectacularly in explaining blackbody radiation and atomic structure https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101077.pdf. Since then, QM has been very successful - even Einstein (who disliked it and thought it incomplete) described it in 1931 as "The last and most successful creation of theoretical physics, namely quantum-mechanics".
https://www.informationphilosopher.c..._Influence.pdf
As usual, you have left me with a lot of ground to cover. I'll cover one topic mentioned in the first link by Tegmark and Wheeler, it was also one of Feynman's favorites.

The "hydrogen catastrophe", why the electron orbiting the hydrogen nucleus in the ground state does not radiate away its energy in about 5ns as Maxwell would predict? A single hydrogen atom in the universe probably would radiate its energy in 5ns, but there are approx 10^80 hydrogen atoms trying to do the same thing. The second law of thermodynamics kicks in saying you cant radiate into a heat bath of the same temperature. Maxwell agrees, saying, the real part of the radiation resistance goes to zero in a 3-dimensional array of like radiators. We now have a sea of energy in equilibrium with all the hydrogen atoms in their ground state. This energy is the zero-point energy (ZPE) or zero-point radiation (ZPR). Quantum mechanics (QM's) call it quantum noise and claim it's only a virtual energy sea, some classical folk say that it's real and it's Lorentz invariant but I don't agree because that leads to another form of the ultraviolet catastrophe. There are measurable effects of the ZPR, one of them is called the Casimir effect. It's interesting to note that the mean value of the equilibrium sea is equal to half of Plank's constant this leads to some folk saying that that with a little work that a Maxwellian derivation of Plank's constant is possible. Prof. Timothy Boyer claims to have already achieved this.

Cheers
Barry

PS. This is a "spectacular failure of physicists" of the standings of Feynman to understand the power and reach of Maxwell's equations
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