Note to Subscribers: This is a substantial modification of yesterday’s post. I’ve published it separately so that subscribers would receive a notification of the revision. I also substantially revised the preceding post on the ACER but directly modified the original which did not produce a notification to subscribers. I apologize for any confusion and will henceforth publish all substantive revisions to existing posts separately. Thank you for your patience.

The preceding post discussed the ACER (Ambient Cosmic Electromagnetic Radiation) and some of its implications. The ACER is present and detectable, at least in part, at the surface of the Earth. The Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered by a ground based antenna and in fact all pre-satellite-era cosmological observations were made at the surface of the Earth and involved the detection of various component frequencies of the ACER.

The situation is somewhat different in a closed room. Most of the ACER that does penetrate the atmosphere will not penetrate the walls and ceiling of the room. There will nonetheless be considerable ambient electromagnetic radiation some of it internally generated (artificial lighting, thermal radiation) and some measure of externally sourced penetrating radiation like radio frequencies. So in an enclosed room there will be an Ambient Local Electromagnetic Radiation (ALER) analogous to the ACER but having a somewhat different frequency distribution.

Some measure of ALER is present in every room humans might typically occupy including rooms dedicated to scientific experiments. Consider the room you are in as you read this. Not only is it suffused with visible light, there are also thermal radiation, radio frequencies and possibly some stray high energy UV and X, and gamma rays. 

We live our lives immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation whether sitting in a room or sitting out under a clear/cloudy, day/night sky. In the aggregate electromagnetic radiation provides the underlying 4-Dimensional framework of the Cosmos — at all scales.

Of particular interest with regard to Quantum Theory are the rooms where quantum experiments such as the double-slit are performed. Those rooms are also steeped in electromagnetic radiation, the ALER. 

In one version of the double-slit experiment electrons are slowly fired at the double slit screen and are subsequently detected at a second screen. As the electrons accumulate they form an interference pattern which is said to prove or at least demonstrate that electrons are both waves and particles. This would be a reasonable conclusion except this explanation takes no notice of the ALER through which the electron is traveling.

An electron affects an electromagnetic field and and is in turn affected by the field. This is not news; it is well established physics. Standard quantum theory pays no attention to the presence of the ALER and its interaction with the free electrons that are the subject of the experiment. 

The ALER is a chaotic field, streaming from all directions and comprised of many frequencies and yet the theoretical explanation of the double-slit experiment takes no account of the inescapable fact of the ALER’s presence and its unavoidable interaction with the electrons. Instead we get a feckless story about a wave-particle duality state that cannot be verified by observation, only believed in.

Such is the state of Quantum Theory — belief is obligatory because reality is irrelevant. In this it is of a piece with the rest of Modern Theoretical Physics. It presents an absurd, incoherent and at root irrational account of physical reality, one that bears almost no resemblance to the physical reality our lying eyes and instruments actually reveal to us. As with Ptolemaic cosmology, the math can be said to “work” but the physics is simply wrong.

Surprisingly this inability to grapple with the nature of physical reality is a matter of choice. There has been an alternate mathematical treatment of quantum mechanics known for more than 70 years. Bohmian mechanics models the double-slit experiment as an interaction between a particle and a guiding or pilot wave.

The mathematics of Bohmian mechanics does not explicitly describe the ALER only an abstract mathematical wave but the implications are clear. It is entirely within the reach of current mathematics to model physical reality without veering off into unrealistic metaphysical conjectures about wave-particle duality or particles that exist in a “superposition of states”. 

The price of this realistic framework is that the math is a bit more complicated than the “wavefunction only” model preferred by a “consensus” of the members of the scientific academy. The high priests of this consensus are quite obviously willing to sacrifice a coherent, logical and realistic account of quantum phenomena on the altar of mathematical convenience. Such is the state of Modern Theoretical Physics.