Ruth & Rindler (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 16:18 (4125 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: If Feynman says that no one understands quantum mechanics, what chance does an ignorant layman like me have of doing so? However, Ruth's Chapter 7 merges science with philosophy, and even if the scientific basis is beyond me, the logic of the argument (which often depends on terminology) is something I ought to understand. There is, as far as I can judge, no difference between Ruth's transactional interpretation of quanta as a process of emission and absorption, and the everyday process of perception, whereby an object emits, the senses absorb, and the brain interprets. -There is a major difference. First of all, Ruth is saying that the Heisenberg 'layer' of reality (HLR)is not our reality. Our spacetime is intimately connected to this other layer, but separate from it. The HLR is quantum energy in many possible potentialities, all interconnected. This is why spookiness at a distance works faster than the speed of light. In the HLR there is no need for speed of light.-Unfortunately we cannot work at the HLR level. we can probe at it, analyze some of it, and with Rindler conjecture mathematically about it. A particle is a smudge or ripple in a field:-"The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word "particle" in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle. A particle is a nice, regular ripple in a field, one that can travel smoothly and effortlessly through space, like a clear tone of a bell moving through the air. A "virtual particle", generally, is a disturbance in a field that will never be found on its own, but instead is something that is caused by the presence of other particles, often of other fields."--"In general, what we have in quantum fields are disturbances of many types. There is a very special disturbance we may call a particle, which is a ripple that can in principle travel forever. But this is an idealization: any real particle interacts with other objects, and this means nothing is ever exactly this precise, idealized ripple. So the issue is how close is it to the ideal case. In most physical processes one deals with objects that are clearly either close to the ideal or very far from the ideal. A photon traveling from the Pleiades is clearly about as close as you are going to get to the ideal; its energy and momentum are almost the perfect match that you would expect for a massless particle. The disturbance between [a "virtual photon exchanged"] between an electron and a nucleus in an atom has very little energy and a lot of momentum; it is very far from what you would call a particle."-http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/-Maybe this is a better link. QM is at the very edge of what we can imagine, since we cannot get at all of it at once. Ruth's transactions are an attempt to explain the back and forth between the layers and to improve our imagination of what the other side is like. Because imagination must be used!