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Neo-Classical Physics or

Quantum Mechanics?


ii

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iii

Neo-Classical Physics or

Quantum Mechanics? A New Theory of Physics

By

Dilip D James

EDUCREATION PUBLISHING (Since 2011)

www.educreation.in


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For the past decade, Dilip D. James has immersed

himself in the subject of quantum mechanics, with

particular emphasis on its advantages and its limitations.

His insights into quantum mechanics; with regard to

both, its successes and its failings, are unmatched. He

looks at what we know now about the sub-atomic world,

and contrasts that to what we thought we knew in 1927,

when quantum mechanics as we know it today was

established. He examines the philosophical basis of

physics and science and what it means in practical terms.

In this book he introduces the Neo-classical Theory of

Physics, a concept he has worked on for several years.

D.D. James displays an uncanny knack for getting

people past the idea that science is inherently dry and

difficult. He has degrees in physics and mathematics is

a confirmed lover of music and is an alumni of the

Trinity College of Music, London. D. D. James is

married and has two sons. He lives in the Nilgiri Hills of

South India.

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This book is dedicated to my mother Susheela who

instilled in me a love of science and gave me the drive

and determination to complete this book, to my father

Ramakuri Sanjeeva Rao James who is ever my

inspiration, to my wife Daphne and my sons Vivian and

Vikram for their unstinting support and encouragement.


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FOREWORD

There is an uncanny resemblance between Christianity in

the Middle Ages and Physics in the Twenty-first

Century. In the former, the common man could not read

the scriptures, because they were written in Latin; the

clergy had to interpret the scriptures for the laity, with

predictable results. Physics in the Twenty First Century

is similar. Only mathematicians with Doctoral degrees

can understand the Universe and how it works, to the

rest of mankind the Universe is an area of darkness. This

is not by any means a desirable development.

As human beings we are all sentient individuals and

as such at a minimum are expected to enquire about our

environment, the world around us, and the Universe we

live in. It is wrong, on a fundamental philosophical

basis, that such knowledge is whether by circumstance

or by design, limited to a privileged few.

This book explains the Universe for the first time in

a way that is comprehensible to everyone. Neo-classical

physics undertakes the study of the behaviour of the

universe as an entity and the physics of sub-atomic

particles in easy to understand everyday terms. Neo-

classical Physics is the language that sets you free. Free

to see, free to comprehend, free to wonder anew.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to Ramesh, Anil

and Rathan, without their assistance this book would not

have been written. My sincere thanks to my editors at

Educreation Publishing, thanks are also due to Sunna,

Zarina, Zara, Anita, Padmini, Ranjini, Simon, Nirmala,

Mohan, Raj, Prem, Inder, Chandra, Clive, Lucy, Rachel,

Sheila, Shanti, Manohar, Suresh, Saumya, Swapna and

Dr. Dayakar Rao. My special thanks to my wife Daphne

and my wonderful sons Vikram and Vivian.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page no.

About the Author V

Dedication vii

Forewords viii

Acknowledgements ix

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

The Solvay Conferences 1

The Philosophy of science 4

Theories of the air 12

Concepts of Classical Physics 15

Quantum Mechanics Concepts 19

Heisenberg‟s Uncertainty Principle 24

Schrodinger‟s equation 31

Fields and the aether 36

The Michelson-Morley Experiment 42

Chapter 2:

The Big Bang Theory and light 52

The Big Bang Theory 52

Cosmic Background Microwave

Radiation 55

Alternative Theories to the Big Bang 58

Measuring distances to the stars 63

The Universe can never be truly explored 66

The neo-classical explanation for the

formation and existence of an aether 69


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Historical perspectives of the Universe 70

From light to aether and back again 71

Ancient Theories on light 76

The neo-classical view of an aether 79

The Propagation of Light 80

Neo-classical theory on the propagation

of light 85

Chapter 3: Max Planck and Light

Quanta 97

Max Planck: 97

The spectral distribution of radiation 103

Introducing Boltzmann‟s statistical

method into the theory of radiation 105

Planck‟s formula 107

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann 111

A more detailed explanation of Planck's

constant 116

What was the outcome of the introduction

of Planck's constant 120

Quantum Physical model of the atom 133

A new interpretation of planck's constant 136

Chapter 4. Wave Theory: Louis De

Broglie, Schrodinger and Einstein 143

Wave Theory 143

The Classical view of waves 143

Mathematical description of one-

dimensional waves 147

Different Wave Forms 148

Sinusoidal waves 149

Depiction of Standing waves 151

Waves utilize Transmission media 152


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Absorption of waves 153

Reflection of waves 153

Interference of waves 154

Refraction of waves 154

Diffraction of waves 155

Polarization of waves 155

Dispersion 156

Waves on strings 156

Acoustic waves 157

Water waves 157

James Clerk Maxwell : Electromagnetic

waves 157

Quantum mechanics: The Schrödinger

equation 160

Waves and particles 160

Position wave function 169

Momentum wave function 174

Position and momentum probability

distributions 175

Thoughts on the De Broglie relation 178

Derivation of de-Broglie Relationship 181

The speed of light and the Principle of

Relativity 189

Chapter 5: Five great Scientists 194

A brief word on the History of Astronomy 194

Johannes Kepler 1571 – 1630 201

Galileo Galilei: 1564 - 1642 208

Sir Isaac Newton 1642 - 1726 213

James Clerk Maxwell 1831 - 1879 230

Albert Einstein 237

Chapter 6 : Ten things that are wrong

with Quantum Mechanics and modern

physics

249

An overview 249


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1. Hoarding a cardinal sin 250

2. Wave-particle duality 256

3. Louis De Broglie and matter waves 258

4. “Complementarity” 259

5. Schrodinger‟s wave function 265

6. The Double Slit Experiment 270

7. Questionable Mathematics in

quantum mechanics 278

8. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 284

9. The quantum mechanics concept of

spin 288

10. Fields matter and particles 297

11. Quantum Mechanics and radio waves 305

Chapter 7. Neo-classical physics 312

The departure from empiricism and

reason 312

Neo-classical physics a short account 318

Taking the fuzziness out of quantum

mechanics 319

Wave particle duality does exist: only not

in the way you thought it did! 323

The hydrogen spectrum 324

Neils Bohr‟s model of the atom 325

The neo-classical structure of the photon 328

The aether 333

On the propagation of light 338

The propagation of a current in a wire 344

Deep space radio transmissions 355

Neo-classical physics and Magnetism 358


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Neo- classical physics and Gravity 366

Einstein‟s Theory of General Relativity 375

The Neo-classical Theory of Gravity 377

Neo-classical physics and Super

conductors 379

Bibliography 384

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Neo-Classical Physics or Quantum Mechanics?

1

CHAPTER- 1

Introduction

“The important thing is to not stop questioning.

Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”

- Albert Einstein

The Solvay Conferences:

The beginning of the twentieth Century saw the

development of extraordinary events in the science of

physics. In December of 1900 Max Planck, a German

physicist, published a scientific paper which was to

throw the world of physics into a fever of confusion and

to change our perception of the world and of matter

forever. So important was the discovery made by Max

Planck that an entire chapter in this book is given to

explaining what that discovery was and how it impacted

the world of physics. The purpose of this book is to try

and convey to the reader the mood and prevailing beliefs

of the time during which quantum mechanics was

formulated and of how physicists of the time reacted to

the revolutionary new developments in physics with

which they were suddenly confronted. A summary of

everything in this book is presented in this introductory

chapter. This book has been written for anyone who is

interested in knowing something about the state of

modern day physics. The Universe is a truly wondrous

place and deserves that each of us take some time to

understand what it means and what our place in it might

be. Although a fair number of mathematical expressions

are present in the book, they are purely incidental, and

not important, it is not necessary either to know or to


Dilip D James

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understand mathematics in order to understand this

book.

One of the key factors in the formulation of

quantum mechanics, were the discussions that took place

at the Solvay conferences. The Solvay conference of

1911 was the first international conference in the history

of science; it brought together in Brussels the leading

physicists of the time for a week-long discussion on the

'quantum theory of radiation'. Subsequently the Solvay

conferences were held every three years but were

interrupted by the First World War.

A key organiser at these scientific conferences was

Hendrik Lorentz, a highly gifted mathematician and

renowned physicist, he would remain the scientific

organizer of the Solvay conferences until his death - the

1927 Solvay conference on quantum mechanics was the

last he chaired. The legendary Bohr/Einstein debate on

the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics started at

this 1927 Solvay conference. The 1927 Solvay was

remarkable in that of the twenty-nine scientists who

attended seventeen would go on to become Nobel

laureates.



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It is therefore apparent that the formulation of

quantum mechanics was a systematic process that was

formulated through active discussion between leading

scientists and physicists from all over the world and not

just a spontaneous science that was formulated by any

one person. It was the physicist's answer to the

seemingly impossible problems posed by Planck's

discovery of light quanta.

Some of the bewilderment and confusion prevalent

at the time can be seen from the statement of F.A.

Lindemann, a young English physicist, who had

attended the First Solvay Conference held in 2011:

"The discussions were most interesting but the

result is that we seem to be getting deeper into the mire

than ever. On every side there seem to be

contradictions.1

The atmosphere surrounding the conception of

Quantum mechanics was one of discussions and heated

clashes between contradictory arguments. The names of

many leading scientists are linked with its development,

including N. Bohr, A. Einstein, M. Planck, E.

Schrödinger, M. Born, W. Pauli, A. Sommerfeld, L. de

Broglie, P. Ehrenfest, E. Fermi, W. Heisenberg, P.

Dirac, R. Feynman, and others. It is also not surprising

that even today anyone who starts studying quantum

mechanics encounters a psychological barrier. Quantum

Mechanics is difficult to accept, this is not so much

because of the mathematical complexity of the subject

but rather is due to the strangeness of the concepts

involved. To reorganize one's pattern of thinking to

accept new and unobvious concepts which are not part of

everyday experience is a difficult undertaking to

achieve.

An important aspect of this book is to study both

the advantages and disadvantages of quantum mechanics

and to demonstrate how these findings might lead to the


Dilip D James

4

formulation of a new neo-classical physics. In order to

gain a true understanding of the facts it is necessary to

first explore the essence of what classical physics and

quantum mechanics represent and in what manner they

differ.

The Philosophy of science:

From the most primitive times man has felt the

urge not merely to accept and react to his environment

but also to attempt to modify, to control and to explain

it. The earliest form of explanations took the form of the

personification of the great natural forces such as the

sun, the wind, the water and the earth. For instance the

ancient Greeks believed that there were five elements

that everything was made up of: Earth, Water, Air, Fire

and Aether. This theory was suggested around 450 BC,

and it was later supported and added to by Aristotle.

Indian and Chinese philosophies based on the same

principles of the four basic elements that are used to

describe interactions and relationships between things,

predated the Greek theory by many centuries. In the

Indian system these five elements were: agni (fire) vayu

(wind) prithvi (earth), jal, (water) and akshaya (aether)

and represented the elemental aspects of nature, while

the five elements in the Chinese system: wood, fire,

earth, metal, and water - were believed to be the

fundamental elements of everything in the universe

between which interactions occur.

Thus the idea of reducing the nature and the

complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances

seems to have been a universal trend in philosophical

thought from the most ancient of times.

While philosophical thought pertaining to the

sciences dates back at least to the time of Aristotle, the

philosophy of science emerged as a distinct discipline



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only in the middle of the 20th century in the wake of

the logical positivism movement, which aimed to

formulate criteria for ensuring all philosophical

statements' meaningfulness and objectively assessing

them. Thomas Kuhn's landmark 1962 book The

Structure of Scientific Revolutions was also formative,

challenging the view of scientific progress as the steady,

cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on a fixed

method of systematic experimentation and instead

argued that any progress is relative to a "paradigm": the

set of questions, concepts, and practices that define a

scientific discipline in a particular historical period.2

Epistemology is concerned with the nature, sources

and limits of knowledge, it is primarily concerned with

propositional knowledge, or the knowledge that such-

and-such is true, rather than other forms of knowledge,

for example the, knowledge of how to such-and-such.

Epistemology questions what knowledge is and how it

can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge

pertinent to any given subject or entity can ever truly be

acquired. When applied to the science of physics, the

study of knowledge and justified belief or epistemology,

becomes particularly important because it clearly sets

out the criteria needed to outline a proposition in

physics. The question that presents itself is in

determining what criteria fulfill the term „justified‟?

The „coherentist‟ approach to science, in which a

theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as

part of a coherent whole, subsequently became

prominent due to W. V. Quine and others. Some thinkers

such as Stephen Jay Gould sought to ground science in

axiomatic assumptions, such as the uniformity of nature.

Others, though in the minority, like Paul Feyerabend

(1924–1994), are vocal in arguing that there is no such

thing as the "scientific method", and that all approaches

to science should therefore be allowed, including


Dilip D James

6

explicitly supernatural ones. Scholars like David Bloor

and Barry Barnes represent yet another approach to

thinking about science which involves studying how

knowledge is created from a sociological perspective.

One of the approaches to science taken by continental

(European) philosophy is a perspective taken from a

rigorous analysis of human experience. What counts as a

good scientific explanation is a closely related question.

In addition to providing predictions about future events,

society often generates scientific theories to provide

explanations for events that occur regularly or have

already occurred. The criteria by which a scientific

theory can be said to have successfully explained a

phenomenon, as well as what it means to say that a

scientific theory has explanatory power has been

investigated by Philosophers.

The deductive-nomological model is one early and

influential theory of scientific explanation. It says if the

scientific explanation for the occurrence of the

phenomena in question has been derived from

a scientific law 3 it may be considered a successful

model. This view with its authoritarian overtones has

been subjected to substantial criticism, resulting in

several widely acknowledged counter examples to the

theory. 4

When the thing to be explained cannot be deduced

from any law it is especially challenging to characterize

what is meant by an explanation because it is a matter of

chance, or otherwise cannot be perfectly predicted from

what is known. 5. The key to a good explanation lies in

unifying disparate phenomena or providing a causal

mechanism 7 maintains one counter argument.

The range of philosophies of the particular sciences

is practically unlimited; from questions about the nature

of time like those raised by Einstein's general relativity,

to the implications of economics for public policy. The



7

question of whether one scientific discipline can be

reduced to the terms of another is a central theme

underlying the philosophy of science. For instance, can

individual psychology be reduced to sociology or can

physics be reduced to chemistry? Some particular

sciences are subject to the general questions of

philosophy of science with greater frequency than are

others. The question of the validity of scientific

reasoning, for example, is seen in a different guise in the

foundations of statistics. The question of life-or-death

arises as a matter of course in the philosophy of

medicine when the problem of what counts as science

and what should be excluded is considered.

Additionally, the philosophies of psychology,

biology, and of the social sciences explore whether

objectivity can ever be achieved in scientific studies of

human nature or alternatively, are inevitably shaped by

values and by social relations.

The question of how one can infer the validity of a

general statement from a number of specific instances is

often taken for granted although in actual fact it is not at

all clear, while on the other hand should the truth of a

theory be inferred from a series of successful tests? 8

Consider the following example, for hundreds of days in

a row, each morning, a farmer comes and feeds a

chicken. Using inductive reasoning the chicken may

therefore infer that the farmer will bring food every

morning. Instead, the farmer comes as usual one

morning and kills the chicken. Is scientific reasoning in

any sense more trustworthy than the chicken's

reasoning?

To acknowledge that induction cannot achieve

certainty is one approach, but the observation of multiple

instances of a general statement can at least make the

general statement more probable. Through using

deductive reasoning the chicken would be right to


Dilip D James

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conclude from experience gained from all those

mornings that it is likely the next morning that the

farmer will again come with food, even if it cannot be

certain. Yet, what precise probability any given evidence

justifies being attributed to the general statement

remains a difficult question to resolve. To declare that all

beliefs about scientific theories are subjective, or

personal is one way out of these particular difficulties

and that how one's subjective beliefs should change over

time 9 is merely evidence of correct reasoning.

One of the arguments advanced is that what

scientists do is not inductive reasoning at all but rather

reasoning based on inference as to the best explanation.

According to this theory, science is about hypothesizing

explanations for what is observed in specific instances

rather than about generalizing. As discussed earlier on, it

is not always clear what is meant by the "best

explanation." A popular rule of thumb that plays an

important role in some versions of this approach is that

of Occam‟s razor, which counsels choosing

the simplest available explanation. Occam's razor, is a

problem-solving principle attributed to William of

Occam (c. 1287–1347), a Franciscan friar in England

who was a scholar, philosopher and theologian. The

principle can be interpreted as stating among competing

hypotheses, the one with the fewest postulates should be

selected.

Returning to the example of the chicken, it would

be simpler to suppose that the farmer cares about it and

will continue taking care of it indefinitely but more

likely that the farmer is fattening it up for slaughter?

Attempts have been made by philosophers to make

this heuristic principle more precise in terms of

theoretical frugality or other measures. It is generally

accepted, that there appears to be no such thing as a

theory-independent measure of simplicity although



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various measures of simplicity have been brought

forward as potential candidates. In short, there are as

many different measures of simplicity available as there

are theories themselves, and the job of choosing between

measures of simplicity appears to be every bit as

problematic as the task of choosing between theories. 11

Generally, on a basic level, when making

observations by looking through telescopes, studying

images on electronic screens, recording meter readings,

and so on scientists agree on what they see, e.g., the

thermometer shows 40.9 degrees C. But it is possible for

these scientists to possess divergent reasoning about the

theories based on observations that have been developed

to explain these observations, if this happens they may

disagree about what they are observing. Theory-laden 12

observations are those observations that cannot be

separated from theoretical interpretation.

All observation involves both perception and

cognition. That is, observation are made by actively

engaging in distinguishing the phenomenon being

observed, rather than passively from surrounding

sensory data. Therefore, one's underlying understanding

of the way in which the world functions affects the

manner in which observations are affected, and that

understanding may influence what is deemed worthy of

consideration, is perceived or noticed. In this sense, it

can be argued that all observation is theory-laden. 13

Should science aim to determine ultimate truth, or

are there questions that science cannot answer?

Scientific theories ought to be regarded as true, claim

Scientific realists since science aims at truth rather than

the approximately true, or the likely true. Scientific anti-

realists argue, conversely, that the aim of science is not

truth, especially truth about un-observables like

electrons or other universes. 14

While instrumentalists

argue that scientific theories should only be evaluated on


Dilip D James

10

their utility. To make predictions and enable effective

technology is in their view the purpose of science. The

question of whether the theories are true or not is beside

the point.

The success of recent scientific theories is often

used as an argument by realists who use this as evidence

for the truth (or near truth) of current theories. 15

The

success of false modeling assumptions, the many false

theories in the history of science, 17

the failure of

epistemic morals are often pointed to by Anti-realists

either 19

as evidence against scientific realism 20

or are

termed postmodern criticisms of objectivity. The

antirealists attempt to explain the success of scientific

theories without reference to truth. 21

Some antirealists argue that the success claimed by

scientific theories is primarily focused at being accurate

only about observable objects and is judged by that

criterion. 22

Values intersect with science in different ways.

There are epistemic values that mainly guide scientific

research. Scientific enterprise is embedded in a

particular culture and values through individual

practitioners. Both product and process emerge as values

from science and can be distributed among several

cultures in society.

`There is considerable scope for values and other

social influences to shape science even if it is unclear

what counts as science, how the process of confirming

theories works, and indeed to determine what the

purpose of science is. Values can play a role ranging

from determining which research gets funded to



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