Light is Not Made of Particles

My lifelong interest in physics started in grade school.  My father Karl Kordesch was a battery chemist from Vienna, and as a child I listened in awe as Karl and his Viennese colleague Adolf Marko discussed science and philosophy and the wonders of the universe.

Adolf and Gudrun Marko
Lakewood Ohio, December 1966

I would not say a word, but I eagerly followed their discussions.   Adolf Marko had done experiments in Parapsychology and a lot of work on EKG telemetry for the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson and of course Karl talked about batteries and fuel cells.  I was fascinated!  We drove down to visit the Marko family in Fairborn, Ohio several times every year and they often came to stay with us.

I was in 7th th grade when I read about MASERS which later became lasers.  On Saturdays I would ride my bike down the long hill on Arthur Avenue to the Lakewood Library on Detroit Road to read about the new MASERs and lasers.  Charles Townes shared the Nobel Prize for inventing the maser-laser in1964.

In Father Kirby's senior physics class at St. Ignatius High School I was inspired by Francis Bitter's book Magnets. I was hooked!  That summer I built a HeNe Laser (a Popular Science Magazine project).  I never got it to work right but I learned a lot about high voltage plasmas and dichroic mirrors.

At Carnegie Mellon University I eagerly took classes in classical mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, solid state physics, astrophysics, differential equations and philosophy.  I avoided Quantum Mechanics.  It looked impossible and confusing.  We worshipped Feynman's Lectures (Caltech) and discussed Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn wrote it in 1962 at UC Berkeley. I still have those books!

In the Peace Corps I taught high school physics for 3 years, and after that I finally took a graduate class in Quantum Mechanics at USC in Los Angeles.  It was disturbing and mostly unintelligible.  Operators, eigenvalues and eigenstates.  I had to drop out half way because I was failing.  I couldn't have an "F" on my record.  (Never play games you can't win!)

Al Kordesch, US Peace Corps, teaching physics at SDAD
Muar, Johore, Malaysia, 1972

In 1976 I married Sharon Chee (from Malaysia) who supported me during grad school at Case Western Reserve University.  I studied solid state physics and semiconductors which got me my dream job at Keithley Instruments.  We designed and manufactured semiconductor test equipment.  It was very interesting and exciting.  I traveled worldwide for customer service and training.  (Keithley is now part of Tektronix).

After 38 years and several more semiconductor companies (IMP, ISD, Winbond, Silterra, Altera) I retired and began to read books on Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology.  Lots of them.  It is safe to say that physics (and many physicists) are still agonizing about all the quantum weird stuff - wave-particle "duality" (Young's double slit experiment), Schrödinger's cat (superposition),  Einstein's bubble paradox (collapse), the EPR paradox, violation of Bell's inequality,  entanglement, delayed choice, violations of locality and causality, and The Measurement Problem (instantaneous wave function collapse).  I could go on.  

Al Kordesch's Farewell Party at Altera Penang
Bayan Lepas, Malaysia, May 8, 2015
Altera is now a division of Intel

As Thomas Kuhn explained, most practicing physicists just keep going, doing their job.   Some choose to ignore this burning dumpster fire, saying "It's not my problem."  Mostly people have just accepted that we seem to live in an incomprehensible, weird quantum world.  Get used to it!  Shut up and calculate.  Don't ask stupid questions.  If it works, don't fix it.  But the idea that a cat (or a human) can be both alive and dead at the same time should make you feel very uncomfortable.    

In the last 100 years a lot of very smart people tried to solve these mind-boggling fundamental problems.  Niels Bohr, De Broglie, Einstein, Wheeler/Everett, Cramer, Mead, Rovelli, and many, many, many more.  Amazon lists over 10,000 books on the topic "Quantum Mechanics."

Carver Mead - Collective Electrodynamics, 2002
Cramer - The Quantum Handshake, 2016
Brooks - At the Edge of Uncertainty, 2016

In March, 2021 I discovered some astonishing essays and papers from a professor in Tomsk, Russia ( S.A. Rashkovskiy) who found the solution.  His new ideas are going to turn quantum physics right-side-up.  In hindsight it's so simple and obvious you have to ask why didn't anybody think of this until now?   Light is just made of ordinary electromagnetic waves.  There aren't any light particles.

Well, I think the answer to that is the incredible progress of measurement technology.  In Einstein's day they had only  primitive  instruments like Wilson cloud chambers (1911), Crookes vacuum tubes with phosphor screens (1870), photographic film (1850), and geiger counters (1928).   A tiny black dot on film clearly indicated that a single "photon" particle had been detected.  When a Geiger counter clicks, it sounds like a single particle of light has been detected.  Cloud chambers clearly show very real charged particle tracks.  So it's not surprising that in the first half of the century scientists explained things with "particles."  But today we have laser diodes, superconductors and Squids, LIGO gravity wave detectors, Large Hadron Colliders, images of galactic black holes and GPS.  We have come a long way.  We can measure so many things that Einstein never even heard of.   Suddenly there is a new explanation for light.

 Light is NOT made of particles!

This astonishing "new" idea solves the embarrassing mysteries, paradoxes and absurdities.

This new idea is actually 220 years old.  Before Max Planck and Albert Einstein, Thomas Young showed (in 1801) that light is made of waves not particles.  Because particles can't produce interference patterns like waves.  It was Planck and Einstein who argued the opposite, that light is made of particles.  Einstein even won his 1921 Nobel Prize for that very particle explanation (the photoelectric effect).

If you change your paradigm to waves, all the paradoxes and contradictions disappear.  All the quantum weird stuff becomes reasonable and obeys normal common sense.  No more weird stuff!!!

There is no "wave-particle duality," just ordinary EM (electromagnetic) waves in Young's double slit experiment.  The black dots are not photons, they are grains in the film.

Schrödinger's cat  is no longer in that weird indefinite "quantum superposition" state waiting for a "measurement" to take place.   Measurements are not magic.

Einstein's bubble paradox doesn't happen because there is no collapse of a "probability wave function."

The EPR paradox doesn't happen with waves.

Bell's inequality is no longer a problem.  Locality is never violated by EM waves!

Entangled (mixed) states do happen but they are normal and make sense.  For example when an atom is smoothly and continuously transitioning between 2 stable states over a period of time.  During this time it is unstable and it is transmitting an electromagnetic (light) wave.  Classical resonators change states the same way.

Delayed choice experiments are no problem with EM waves, only with particles.

The "measurement problem" (instant wave function collapse) does not occur with EM waves.  Electromagnetic waves never collapse so there is no "measurement problem."

Heisenberg's famous "Uncertainty Principle" is just ordinary math.  It's no longer a weird mystery, it's a property of any wave including sound waves, water waves and radio waves.  

So do I think I am smarter than Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman?  Is it foolish and arrogant for an unknown amateur engineer to discredit 100 years of expert research and publications by the world's best and brightest physicists?  According to Kuhn, it is always the amateur outsiders who see a new paradigm.  The establishment defends the current view until it is absolutely no longer possible.   Do I understand everything?   No!  The world will always be full of puzzles, and whenever one is solved we see at least 10 new puzzles.   We are still puzzled and amazed by the big bang, black holes, string theory, quarks, gluons, it never stops. 

How can standard Quantum Mechanics be wrong, when it has been so amazingly successful?   I never said it was "wrong."   It's not wrong.  I just found a professor who explained it better, in a way that is easy to understand and obeys common sense.    The textbooks can mostly stay the same, just cross out the parts where it says "the particle was detected."   Change it to say "the wave was detected."  And delete all those embarrassing paradoxes.

As Kuhn said in his book, it usually takes one whole generation to switch paradigms.  How long did it take for Darwin's Theory of Evolution (1858) to catch on?  Over 160 years and counting.  And continental drift?   In 1912 the meteorologist Alfred Wegener described what he called continental drift, an idea that culminated fifty years later in the modern theory of plate tectonics.  I remember that debate.  Wegener was ridiculed!  After all he was a meteorologist.  What did he know about geology?

If you are interested here is a reference link to one of Sergei S Rashkovskiy's main papers on arxiv (it's free to download the PDF).   You can search for his name and easily find more publications.

Quantum Mechanics Without Quanta 2019    https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02113

You might ask "What's wrong with having two models for the same experiment?  You like waves, I prefer particles... maybe we're both right!"    Maybe there are two ways to explain light, is that so wrong?

If you just want to calculate the statistical probability of a transition from state A to state B, the particle formula obviously works.   You will get the right answer.  The math formulas are accurate and correct.  But the explanation is nonsensical.   It is mind-boggling to talk about "Schrödinger probability waves"  because probability does not travel through space in waves.  Probability waves can't carry energy and momentum and spin.  Does probability travel at the speed of light?  Or faster?  Can a mirror reflect probability? Who knows?   Probability is just information in your head or my head.   

If you want to explain how something got from A to B, if you want to understand what's happening along the way, the process, how it works, you have to picture it in terms of waves, not particles.  When a radio wave is transmitted, it is not made of any "particles."  When starlight comes from a distant galaxy it is just a radio wave, not tiny marbles or bullets of light.

Now you and I don't have to read those 10,000 books.  Especially not the ones about quantum consciousness or quantum healing.