Let's Get the Nonsense out of Our Quantum Textbooks

 Let's Get the Nonsense  

Out of our Quantum Mechanics Textbooks!

The famous mind-boggling "Paradoxes" of quantum Mechanics were solved in the 1970's when Field Theory became the leading explanation for quantum behavior.

But look in any textbook today and you still see an explanation of "Schrödinger's cat paradox" and "waves of probability" that mysteriously collapse "upon measurement."  Some of the textbooks even apologize, but then they claim it's an experimentally proven fact, so we are forced to believe it.

Collapse is not an experimental fact.  Nobody has measured a "collapse"  because it's just the way probability works.  When you flip a coin, the probability suddenly collapses from 50-50 to 100%.

Here is the standard (textbook) picture.  

An excited atom emits a photon particle.   Waves of probability spread out in all directions into the room, travelling at the speed of light.  After a few nanoseconds the whole photon particle suddenly appears at a photon particle detector.   All of the original energy in that photon gets completely absorbed by the atoms in the detector.  The probability wave has instantly collapsed to certainty.  

Imagine a pitcher throwing a baseball and the catcher catching the whole ball in one piece.  The ball does not get lost.  Energy is conserved.  That's the normal, non-quantum world.  But in the quantum world of photons we can't ever know the actual trajectory (Heisenberg's uncertainty).  In the textbook quantum picture there is no trajectory, only an initial state and a final state.  Individual photon particle trajectories don't exist.  We can never even mention trajectories.  The best we can do is calculate the probability that a photon will arrive and be detected.  The theory does not describe how it got there.

Imagine a pitcher throwing a baseball and
the catcher catching the whole ball in one piece. 

Here is the field theory version.

An excited atom emits a burst of light.  This electromagnetic wave spreads out in all directions.  Like any wave, it becomes weaker the farther it goes.  The energy spreads out all over the room.  Some of the energy heats up the floor and the walls, but a very small part of the wave is detected and registers a "click" or "dot" in a light detector (a camera).

We can imagine a TV broadcast antenna sending out radio waves in all directions.  Our TV receiver detects a tiny fraction of it, converting it into an image on our TV screen.  Most of the broadcast energy heats up the environment, yet the total energy is still conserved.  No probability.  No uncertainty.  Nothing collapsed.  The antenna does not shoot out any "radio particles." 

Imagine a TV broadcast antenna sending out a wave in all directions.

Probability must "Collapse."

When you win the California Lottery, instantly all the other tickets become worthless.  This is a vivid  illustration of probability "collapse."  There can't be two winners.  In Particle Theory you start with one particle.  When it is detected somewhere, instantly every other location in the universe has exactly zero probability.  Somehow all the losers need to be notified, so the same particle doesn't get detected elsewhere.   

That picture makes no sense at all.

Probability only makes sense when there are multiple events.  Standard Quantum Mechanics makes sense for ensembles, not for any single individual particle.   We prepare an initial state and QM tells us the probability of the final states.  Don't ask QM what happens to particles along the way, because QM doesn't deal with that.  QM does not give particle trajectories, in fact it says they can't exist  (Heisenberg).  Field Theory explains the mechanism with wave motion.  Single waves make sense, single particles don't.  (Ensembles of 100 Schrodinger cats would be interesting).

Transmitters and Receivers are not similar.

A TV transmitter broadcasts 100 kW.  But my TV antenna receiver detects something like 1 microWatt. The transmitter is nothing like the receiver.

But textbooks usually depict the process of emission as the reverse of absorption.  One photon is emitted, then one is absorbed.   Read the explanation of the double slit paradox.  One photon is emitted, goes through the slits, and the same photon is absorbed on the screen or detector.  This explanation sounds like the story of the baseball, where the "transmitter" (the pitcher) is generally similar to the "receiver" (the catcher).   They are about the same size and power.

The process of photon emission from an excited atom is nothing like the process that goes on at the anode of a vacuum tube photomultiplier tube.  (We used to call then Geiger Counters).   Field Theory explains both emission and detection with a more reasonable picture.  Waves are emitted in every direction and (much smaller) waves are later detected by the photomultiplier.  Every step along the way the entire process is smooth and well-defined.  There are no instantaneous jumps or transitions.

Probability is still there, if you want to calculate it.

https://waves-without-particles-universe.blogspot.com/2021/12/shut-up-and-calculate.html