My Opinion on The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics

The prize went to Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger for "Shaking the foundations of Physics."

Yes, they did that.  Their experiments (50 years ago) decided once and for all that the "Discrete Particle View" of physics is correct and the "Continuous Wave View" is wrong.  Data doesn't lie.  It's been repeated over and over.  Almost everyone believes it.

Let me explain.  The famous controversy goes way back, several centuries.  Is light a wave or is it a particle?  These two opposing views were still a hot debate topic 100 years ago when Einstein got his Nobel Prize.

Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen friends argued vehemently that when you zoom in, light is BOTH wave and particle, depending on the situation.  They called this "duality" and it has become the de-facto view.  It is taught in all our schools.  You have to adhere to it if you want to be taken seriously in the world of professional Physics.

The duality view goes like this.  Light travels along behaving like a wave, but when it gets detected (measured) it suddenly behaves like a tiny point particle, a photon.  A quantum of light.  Indivisible.  The waves are just probability waves, not physical objects, until they are actually measured.   Probability does not fly around in space, probability is in my head.  Probability is just a calculation.

The Copenhagen view has been very, very successful.  So much that even Einstein, Schrodinger, Pauli and Dirac were reluctantly converted.  Their continuous wave view seemed to give the wrong answers.   Nobody could explain why light made tiny black dots on film, and made Geiger counters "click."  The continuous wave view contradicted the actual measured data.

Aspect and Clauser's experiment at Berkeley confirmed (by violating John Bell's inequality) that Copenhagen is right, Einstein is wrong.  That's what everyone believed.  Most people still do.

But recently more and more physicists are finding that Einstein's continuous wave views (classical electromagnetic waves) give exactly the same results as Aspect and Clauser.  Ordinary classical electrodynamics can violate John Bell's inequality.  

In the words of Sergei A Rashkovskiy, "A violation of the Bell’s inequalities proves only that the intensities of light waves arriving at different detectors are correlated in full compliance with classical electrodynamics and classical optics."  Reference

I agree with Rashkovskiy and Brian La Cour.   Einstein was mostly right after all.  Light is just a wave.  There are no discrete light "particles."  Particles may be a useful construct for statistical calculations, but the underlying model should be wave theory.   

Al Kordesch