Quantum Resonance 5 - The Issue With Spontaneity

Niels Bohr made a very important remark: ‘The task of physics is not to find out how nature is. Physics is only concerned what we can say about it.’ David Lindley likened that to Wittgensteins ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ I fully agree that science is not about discovering nature but rather creating means to communicate about it. It is about understandable concepts that humans can relate to.

In relationship to causality in physics there is one term that has been used for over a hundred years while its meaning is incredibly ambiguous – the adjective SPONTANEOUS.

Spontaneity describes something that happens natural, unconstrained and unplanned, or from internal forces or causes without external influence. That is not necessarily how it is used in physics. Its synonyms are even more troubling: automatic, impulsive; instinctive, involuntary, reflex, unpremeditated, free, uncompelled, unforced, willful and even casual.

I would say that we describe something as spontaneous when we simply do not know what the cause is. Our lack of knowledge can simply mean that we assume spontaneity wrongly. The very first use of spontaneity has been in thermodynamcis, where is was assumed that heat flows spontaneously from a hot to a colder area. Nothing could be more wrong. The cause is the existing potential between higher and lower energy states. While it is apparently so that no one tells or forces a single molecule to pass on its Brownian motion of heat to the next one, that molecule is enticed to act by outside conditions. A claim of spontaneity assumes some decomposable inner function that is the cause of the willful act.

It seems quite obvious that these spontaneous actions emerge from energetic relationships that promote the interaction of entities. Energence means that there is no decomposable inner functionality, but the function appears ONLY in the relationships between two entities. It has no other independent substance or existence.

In quantum mechanics the proposal is that the probability potential of an entity is the driver of the spontaneous actions of that entity, for example to shed a photon or an alpha particle. As strange as it may seem – and I hope you can follow my reasoning here – the assumption of truly spontaneous acts is the reason for the problems with causality in physics. I even propose it is the reason for possibly all paradoxes such as the wave/particle duality, entranglement and photon tunneling.

The spontaneous shedding creates the existence of that particle that now has be considered and communicated about as such! We say: we don’t know how it got here – but here it is! And then we are utterly surprised that the particle we created out of thin air resists detection and measurement. We start with an unexplained spontaneous act and then we expect causality. We cement the ‘existence’ of that particle or wave packet by probabilizing abouts it Hamiltonians and Lagrangians (momentum and location).

Let me try to say it with Bohr: ‘When we can talk about the probability potential of a particle, it is a statistical description that is helpful, but that is NOT the driver that causes a natural, spontaneous act.’ Probabilities are a post-mortem analysis that allow us to understand the likelyhood of something. While I as a person have a certain probabiity to have a certain accident, it does not tell me what the causes of such an accident would be and also not when it will actually happen. Probability is a correlation of data, it is not causation!

Because Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) – for which Richard Feynman,Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga received the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics – deals with interactions only, it is the most accurate (to 12 decimals) physical theory thus far. But also QED can only predict the probability of what will happen in an experiment. QED describes charged particle interactions using perturbation theory which are representated as Feynman diagrams. A Feynman diagram assigns each photon exchange path a complex-valued probability amplitude, and the paths with stationary phase (no destructive interference) represent the stationary classical path between the two points. The photon does not cause the energy transfer, but it is just a representation of it. It is not shed spontaneously, but emerges because of the potential between sender and receiver. The wave resonances between the sender and receiver are calculated by QED.

The probability amplitude is a statistical communication means about the abstract potential of one entity such as a photon, but the cause of the spontaneous interaction is the relationship between the two probability amplitudes. The problem is that current theories (QM and GR) do not allow that such two entities interact in a background invariant (relativistic) manner.David Bohm suggested that there are non-local hidden variables that enable that communication. Bell’s Theorem provides experimental proof that local hidden variable theories cannot predict the measurements of distant entangled photons. But what if there are no hidden variables – local or not, but already too many? What if space and time are not a continuum but just two properties (or consequences) of energetic interactions and not the background against which we measure momentum and location? Would that not be true general relativity?

I think we need to shed spontaneity in physics rather than photons and we need to stop looking at the causality of particles hitting other particles. We need continue the direction of QED and drop some of Einsteins assumptions that are still too much linked to classical physics. Entanglement, photon tunneling, and EPR quantum eraser experiments say that we are wrong about time or wrong about the speed of light. You may be surprised that also QED proposes that the photons travel at speeds faster or slower than light, but just average out. Gravity as the only measurement of mass (inertia is not an effect of mass I believe) does interact timelessly at a distance and not with the speed of light.

I spontaneously shed herewith Einstein’s speed-of-light shackles …