https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-is-the-electroweak-force

"The electromagnetic force and the weak force differ greatly in their functions, mechanisms, ranges and strength. But in the 1960s, scientists realized that both are expressions of a single, unified fundamental force: the electroweak force.

"When we look at how the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear forces function in our universe, it’s easy to see why physicists didn’t immediately catch on to their special relationship.

"Electromagnetism provides the electricity we use to access digital articles, like this one, and the visible light we need to see the words on our screens. It is responsible for the Earth’s magnetic field, which prevents us from being flash-fried by cosmic rays, and it even enables the chemical bonds required for biological life.

"The weak nuclear force, while also essential, is considerably less versatile. It is primarily responsible for radioactive beta decay, a subatomic process that causes unstable particles to transform into other, less massive particles. This decay is crucial for the nuclear reactions that power the sun and other stars.

"And electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force don’t differ just in their effects; the particles that make up each of these forces are just as distinct.

"One of the basic tenets of particle physics is that everything in our regular, everyday world is made of particles. These particles are really “local excitations,” essentially tiny wiggles, within quantum fields that pervade all of space. Each type of particle is described by a quantum field.

"A local excitation of the electromagnetic field is called a photon. All of the electromagnetic effects we observe are the result of the photon’s unique combination of qualities. It has no electric charge, and it has no mass. With nothing to slow it down, it zooms across the universe at lightspeed.

"The weak force is mediated by a different particle—three of them, in fact: the neutral Z boson and two W bosons, one bearing a positive and the other a negative electric charge. Relative to the fleet-footed photon, these three weak-force particles are heavy and comparatively slow. They’ll quickly disintegrate if they travel even the width of an atomic nucleus.

***

"Physicists now understand that at some point in the fractions of seconds immediately following the Big Bang, there was one, combined electroweak force. Mere picoseconds later, this unified electroweak force split into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see today.

"For decades, scientists were unsure of how this transition happened, postulating that something must have broken this force apart. “When the universe cooled from a very high temperature down to lower temperatures, it underwent a phase transition at the energy scale at which the electroweak force breaks,” says Tevong You, an assistant professor in physics at King’s College London. “This is very similar to if you change the temperature of a pond, and you go from a liquid phase to ice” at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Whatever broke apart the electroweak force during that phase transition had to result in the four original massless electroweak force particles transforming into three very massive weak-force particles and one massless electromagnetic particle, the photon.

"Based on this idea, scientists predicted the existence of a quantum field that could give mass to some (but not all) elementary particles: the Higgs field. In 2012, scientists at experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the particle associated with that field, the Higgs boson."

Comment: Well, we learn how the Higgs boson was found. I've left out a complex discussion of gauge theory in which the constraints of a particle's activities are mathematically described. Remember all particles have fields of action.

https://quizwithit.com/start/1696811301328x301364883622124100

"This update of the wave-function is also sometimes called the collapse or reduction of the wave-function and it’s a key element of quantum mechanics. If you don’t update the wave-function, you will get wrong probabilities. If you want to know for example, what’s the probability of measuring the particle on the left given that it was measured on the right, the answer should be zero. But this only comes out correctly if you update the wave-function.

"The update of the wave-function is instantaneous. It happens at the same time everywhere and is the reason why quantum mechanics is non-local. This wave-function update is what Einstein called a “spooky action at a distance”.

***

'If quantum mechanics is fundamentally correct, then the world is non-local, period. But if there’s an underlying reality in which the outcome of a measurement was determined, we just didn’t know of it, then this reality could well be local. This is called a hidden variables model.

***

"The reason that quantum mechanics is non-local is a combination of (a) the observational fact that a measurement outcome in one place tells you something about another measurement outcome in another place. If you measure the particle here, you now know you won’t measure it there. Fact, not interpretation. And (b) the absence of other variables in the theory that could have carried the information locally. This is why quantum mechanics is non-local.

***

"The Many Worlds interpretation now is based on the idea that you can throw out the update of the wave-function by re-interpreting what happens in a measurement. According to this interpretation, all outcomes of a measurement happen, each in its own universe. But we can only ever see the result in one universe, so for us it *looks like the wave-function collapses.

"Instead of the measurement update, in many worlds, we have what is called a “branching” or “splitting” of worlds. This branching makes it impossible for one observer to see more than one outcome of a measurement. The major challenge for many worlds is to explain why the thing we call an observer does not itself branch with those worlds therefore sees all the outcomes, but somehow randomly only experiences one of those worlds.

***

but then Many Worlds makes the same predictions and standard quantum mechanics.

"It also leaves you with the mind blowing idea that each time a quantum particle bounces off another one, which happens gazillions of times a second, our entire universe splits, and anything that can happen does happen. Had salad for lunch today? Well in some other universe you had pizza, with Elon Musk, on Mars. Whatever you can think of, so long as it respects the laws of nature, it’s real, in some parallel universe.

***

"No, the biggest problem with many worlds is that its supporters believe their interpretation is somehow better than the standard interpretation with the collapse when it’s really just as mediocre.

"Many worlds supporters often claim that their interpretation is simpler because it just does away with the collapse postulate. But as we saw earlier, you need the collapse postulate to calculate probabilities. You can’t just throw it out, that doesn’t work. And indeed, this is not how the many worlds interpretation works. It’s how Many Worlds supporters *say* that it works, but it’s not true.

"At this point things get a bit murky because there isn’t just one many worlds interpretation. There are two original ones, going back to Hugh Everett and Bryce DeWitt, but meanwhile there are dozens of slightly different versions.

***

"I find it surprising how many physicists are confused by this. Lots of papers have been written about how many worlds can be made local. But of course, the only way to make it local would be to introduce some kind of hidden variable that transports information locally.

"This was exactly the point of the famous paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, now just known as the EPR paper. They said, if you want reality to be local, you need an element of reality that underlies quantum mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is incomplete. The paper’s now almost 90 years old, but physicists still don’t get it, do they.

***

"As Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen said, if you want to have a local theory, you need something to transport the information locally. The wave-function doesn’t do it, so you need something else. The many worlds interpretation doesn’t introduce anything new to get the job done, so of course it’s still non-local.

***

"In summary, the Many Worlds interpretation is neither wrong nor unscientific, but it’s exactly as problematic as standard quantum mechanics. Whether you believe that all those parallel universes exist is up to you. We can neither confirm them nor rule them out."

Comment: Hossenfelder is being polite. Many worlds theory is mental masturbation, totally unproven and unproveable. No matter how far apart particles are split each one knows what the other is doing.

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-the-pauli-exclusion-principle?utm_source=ScienceAl...

"The Pauli exclusion principle is a rule in quantum mechanics that explains why only a limited number of electrons can occupy any one of an atom's orbitals.

"Predicted by Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1920s, the exclusion principle underpins basic chemistry, and helps explain why massive objects like neutron stars and white dwarfs resist gravity crushing them into infinitely small black holes.

"Pauli's exclusion principle states two or more bound electrons can't have the same four quantum numbers when in the same system. Particles with the same energy, magnetic quantum number, intrinsic angular momentum, and orbital angular momentum simply cannot sit in the same seat around an atom's center stage.

"The reason for this is more a feature of mathematics than anything, so it can be a little hard to picture.

"To appreciate it, we need to stop thinking of electrons as tiny solid objects (like the picture below on the left) and remember they are more like flickering 'ghosts' that haven't really worked out where to appear yet.

***

"One is that any two particles sitting at the same level of energy around a nucleus – with otherwise identical characteristics – would behave nothing like electrons.

***

"a fundamental part of an electron's wave-like behavior forbids them from overlapping perfectly with one another. It's a principle of identity that applies not just to electrons but to all subatomic particles that belong to the group of fermions. (My bold)

***

"Astronomers also note the consequences of this exclusion principle – it takes an incredible amount of energy to force electrons into spaces they don't typically move in, such as the inside of protons, which helps explain the workings of exotic objects like neutron stars. Push hard enough, and they may even lose all identity, mushing together into the space of a black hole's core."

Comment: the key is the bolded paragraph which tells us electrons repel other electrons very strongly. In an atom, electrons will occupy different orbits if another orbit is filled with its electrons.

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-loops-in-the-fabric-of-reality-physicists-get-f...

"Known as 'Alice rings' after the Alice of 'Wonderland' fame, the circular structures were observed by a collaboration between researchers in the US and Finland which already has a long list of discoveries concerning the distortions in quantum fields known as topological monopoles.

"The isolated equivalent of a pole on a magnet, monopoles truly sound like something Alice would have seen in her hunt for the white rabbit. Cutting a magnet in half won't succeed in separating its north from south, but monopoles can theoretically arise in the quantum machinery that gives rise to various forces and particles.

***

"In 2015, just a year after proving a topological monopole's existence, Möttönen and his colleagues triumphantly succeeded in observing one in isolation for the first time in an ultra-cold state of rubidium atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

"'We are the only ones who have been able to create topological monopoles in quantum fields," Möttönen explained to ScienceAlert.

"'After creating them, it took some time for us to also study quantum knots and skyrmions before we had a close look at what happens to the topological monopole right after it has been created."

"Less than two years after their initial observation, the collaboration made a surprise discovery – monopoles could decay into other types.

"In this latest investigation, the researchers again watched a topological monopole melt into something else, only this time the end result was more like a tiny doorway into Wonderland – structures named Alice strings.

"Alice strings are closely associated with monopoles, twisting into one-sided magnetic poles whenever they close into loops. And those loops of Alice strings are known as Alice rings.

"Yet while typical monopoles might last a few thousandths of a second, Alice rings stick around for more than 80 milliseconds – some 20 times longer.

"'From a distance, the Alice ring just looks like a monopole, but the world takes a different shape when peering through the center of the ring," says David Hall, a physicist from Amherst College in the US.

"Like Alice's own looking glass, passing through the strange magnetic loop in a BEC's quantum field can turn everything on its head. Other monopoles that happen to fall through become reversed into their mirror-versions, flipping the ring into its opposite as they slide on through."

Comment: quantum physics advances get weirder and weirder in their discoveries, but this is the basis of our reality. The answer to the question 'why' can only be it is required.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-theorys-measurement-problem-may-be-a...

"In textbook quantum theory, before collapse, the system is said to be in a superposition of two states.

"This collapse-inducing process is the murky source of the measurement problem: it’s an irreversible, one-time-only affair—and no one even knows what defines the process or boundaries of measurement. What amounts to a “measurement” or, for that matter, an “observer”? Do either of these things have physical constraints, such as minimal or maximal sizes?

"Quantum Theory's 'Measurement Problem' May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality
A core mystery of quantum physics hints that objective reality is illusory—or that the quantum world is even weirder than expected.

"At the heart of this bizarreness is what’s called the measurement problem...the measurement causes the system’s multiple possible states to randomly “collapse” into one definite state. But this accounting doesn’t define what constitutes a measurement—hence, the measurement problem.

"Attempts to avoid the measurement problem—for example, by envisaging a reality in which quantum states don’t collapse at all—have led physicists into strange terrain where measurement outcomes can be subjective.

" In a recent preprint, the trio proved a theorem that shows why certain theories—such as quantum mechanics—have a measurement problem in the first place and how one might develop alternative theories to sidestep it, thus preserving the “absoluteness” of any observed event.

"But their work also shows that preserving such absoluteness comes at a cost many physicists would deem prohibitive. “It’s a demonstration that there is no pain-free solution to this problem,” Ormrod says. “If we ever can recover absoluteness, then we’re going to have to give up on some physical principle that we really care about.”

"Holding on to absoluteness of observed events, it turns out, could mean that the quantum world is even weirder than we know it to be.

"Gaining a sense of what exactly Ormrod, Venkatesh and Barrett have achieved requires a crash course in the basic arcana of quantum foundations.

"In textbook quantum theory, before collapse, the system is said to be in a superposition of two states, and this quantum state is described by a mathematical construct called a wave function, which evolves in time and space. This evolution is both deterministic and reversible: given an initial wave function, one can predict what it’ll be at some future time, and one can in principle run the evolution backward to recover the prior state.

"This collapse-inducing process is the murky source of the measurement problem: it’s an irreversible, one-time-only affair—and no one even knows what defines the process or boundaries of measurement. What amounts to a “measurement” or, for that matter, an “observer”? Do either of these things have physical constraints, such as minimal or maximal sizes? And must they, too, be subject to various slippery quantum effects, or can they be somehow considered immune from such complications? None of these questions have easy, agreed-upon answers
"Given the example system, one model that preserves the absoluteness of the observed event—meaning that it’s either heads or tails for all observers—is the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory (GRW). In GRW, quantum systems can exist in a superposition of states until they reach some as-yet-underdetermined size, at which point the superposition spontaneously and randomly collapses, independent of an observer. Whatever the outcome—heads or tails in our example—it shall hold for all observers.

:But GRW, which belongs to a broader class of “spontaneous collapse” theories, seemingly runs afoul of a long-cherished physical principle: the preservation of information....By postulating a random collapse, GRW theory destroys the possibility of knowing what led up to the collapsed state—which, by most accounts, means information about the system prior to its transformation becomes irrecoverably lost. “[GRW] would be a model that gives up information preservation, thereby preserving absoluteness of events,” Venkatesh says.

***

"So if a theory is Bell nonlocal, it implicitly acknowledges the free will of the experimenters. “What I suspect is that they are sneaking in a free choice assumption,” Wiseman says.

"This is not to say that the proof is weaker. Rather it would have been stronger if it had not required an assumption of free will. As it happens, free will remains a requirement. Given that, the most profound import of this theorem could be that the universe is nonlocal in an entirely new way. If so, such nonlocality would equal or rival Bell nonlocality, an understanding of which has paved the way for quantum communications and quantum cryptography.

"In the end, only experiments will point the way toward the correct theory, and quantum physicists can only prepare themselves for any eventuality."

Comment: the universe is non-local. Any theory must include that concept. This dense quantum theorizing may not compute with all readers but it the basis of our reality.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/standard-model-particle-physics

"In a new experiment, scientists measured a magnetic property of the electron more carefully than ever before, making the most precise measurement of any property of an elementary particle, ever. Known as the electron magnetic moment, it’s a measure of the strength of the magnetic field carried by the particle.

"That property is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, the theory that describes particles and forces on a subatomic level. In fact, it’s the most precise prediction made by that theory.

"By comparing the new ultraprecise measurement and the prediction, scientists gave the theory one of its strictest tests yet. The new measurement agrees with the standard model’s prediction to about 1 part in a trillion, or 0.1 billionths of a percent, physicists report in the February 17 Physical Review Letters.

"When a theory makes a prediction at high precision, it’s like a physicist’s Bat Signal, calling out for researchers to test it. “It’s irresistible to some of us,” says physicist Gerald Gabrielse of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

***

"The new result is more than twice as precise as the previous measurement, which stood for over 14 years, and which was also made by Gabrielse’s team. Now the researchers have finally outdone themselves. “When I saw the [paper] I said, ‘Wow, they did it,’” says Stefano Laporta, a theoretical physicist affiliated with University of Padua in Italy, who works on calculating the electron magnetic moment according to the standard model."

Comment: this attests to our ability to understand the deepest secrets of our reality.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/reality-objective-exist/?utm_source=mailchimp&a...

"...there had previously been a set of assumptions that came along with our notion of reality that are no longer universally agreed upon, and chief among them is that reality itself exists in a fashion that’s independent of the observer or measurer. In fact, two of the greatest advances of 20th century science — relativity and quantum mechanics — specifically challenge our notion of objective reality, and rather point to a reality that cannot be disentangled from the act of observing it. Here’s the bizarre science of what we know, today, about the notion of objective reality.

***

"Does this mean that there is no such thing as objective reality? Not necessarily; there could be an underlying reality that exists whether we measure it or not, and our measurements and observations are just a crude, insufficient way to reveal the full, true character of what our objective reality actually is. Many people believe that this will someday be shown to be the case, but so far — and this advance was just awarded 2022’s Nobel Prize in Physics — we can place very meaningful constraints on what just type of “reality” exists independent of our observations and measurements. To the best that we can tell, the real outcomes that arise in the Universe cannot be divorced from who is measuring them, and how.

"It isn’t the job of science, contrary to popular belief, to explain the Universe that we inhabit. Instead, science’s goal is to accurately describe the Universe that we inhabit, and in that it’s been remarkably successful. But the questions that most of us get excited about asking — and we do it by default, without any prompting — often involve figuring out why certain phenomena happen. We love notions of cause-and-effect: that something occurs, and then later on, as a consequence of that first thing occurring, something else happens because of it. That’s true in many instances, but the quantum Universe can violate cause-in-effect as well in a variety of ways. (my bold)

"One such question that we cannot answer is whether there is such a thing as an objective, observer-independent reality. Many of us assume that it does, and we build our interpretations of quantum physics in such ways that they admit an underlying, objective reality. Others don’t make that assumption, and build equally valid interpretations of quantum physics that don’t necessarily have one. All we have to guide us, for better or for worse, is what we can observe and measure. We can physically describe that, successfully, either with or without an objective, observer-independent reality. At this moment in time, it’s up to each of us to decide whether we’d rather add on the philosophically satisfying but physically extraneous notion that “objective reality” is meaningful."

Comment: The reality we experience is not the underlying reality. Note my bold. Science tells us what God did, but not how. dhw always wants to know the how. Good luck!!! This essay is filled with examples of how to answer quantum mechanics with great value.

https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-gravity-sensor-enables-us-to-look-under-earth-s-su...

"Scientists would be able to discover much more about what lies underground if our planet could be sliced open and viewed as a cross-section – but as that's not really possible, they have to rely on a variety of other methods instead.

"One new approach has just been proven in the field: A recently developed device called a quantum gravity gradiometer has been used to successfully spot a tunnel buried a meter (a little over 3 feet) underground.

"Typical gravity sensors work by comparing slight differences in the positions of identical light waves. This works fine for large structures, but for smaller hidden objects the shimmy and shake of the ground, the equipment, and even random thermal vibrations make it increasingly harder to make out details.

"A quantum gravity sensor adds a filter that makes use of the wave-like nature of atoms in free-falling, ultra-cold clouds, radically improving the sensor's resolution. The almost imperceptible differences in how gravity affects these atoms reveal the composition of the ground underneath, highlighting gaps in the ground such as tunnels.

***

"The new instrument is a type of atom interferometer – devices which have been in development for more than 20 years. The challenge has been getting them into a size and form that means they can be deployed practically outdoors.

"Now that the quantum gravity gradiometer has passed its first real-world test outside of the lab, it offers plenty of potential to be useful in any kind of scenario where we need to know what's lying underground.

***

"That could be laying the foundations for a new subway system, for example, or in trying to predict a volcanic eruption. The new instrument is cheaper, faster, and more comprehensive than many currently available alternatives, and should also be more reliable in its mapping.

"In particular, the sensor excels at cutting out interference from vibrations, variations in temperature, and shifts in magnetic fields – all of which can make it difficult for pieces of equipment to figure out what's lying underground.

"'Detection of ground conditions such as mine workings, tunnels and unstable ground is fundamental to our ability to design, construct and maintain housing, industry and infrastructure," says geophysicist George Tuckwell, from the University of Birmingham.

"'The improved capability that this new technology represents could transform how we map the ground and deliver these projects."

"While this "new window into the underground" is operational, there are still some limitations in terms of the size and depth of the structures that can be detected, and how different a structure's density needs to be from its surroundings.

"Development on the device will continue, and the researchers are confident it can be made more portable and user-friendly in the future. It could get up to 100 times more sensitive with further study, the team behind the sensor says."

Comment: a testament to our ingenuity

https://www.livescience.com/imaginary-numbers-needed-to-describe-reality

Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested.

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial.

***

But in the absence of hard experimental evidence to rule upon the predictions of these "all real" equations, a question has lingered: Are imaginary numbers an optional simplification, or does trying to work without them rob quantum theory of its ability to describe reality?

Now, two studies, published Dec. 15 in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, have proved Schrödinger wrong. By a relatively simple experiment, they show that if quantum mechanics is correct, imaginary numbers are a necessary part of the mathematics of our universe.

***

The researchers stressed, however, that their experiment only rules out theories that forgo imaginary numbers if the reigning conventions of quantum mechanics are correct. Most scientists are very confident that this is the case, but this is an important caveat nonetheless.

Comment: If we use imaginary numbers that mathematicians make up to describe the quantum basis of reality, then any form of materialism is dead.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/08/11/this-is-why-quantum-mechanics-i...

"Normally, in our older, classical treatment, fields push on particles that are located at certain positions and change each particle’s momentum. But if the particle’s position and momentum are inherently uncertain, and if the particle(s) that generate the fields are themselves uncertain in position and momentum, then the fields themselves cannot be treated in this fashion: as though they’re some sort of static “background” that the quantum effects of the other particles are superimposed atop.

"If we do, we’re short-changing ourselves, inherently missing out on the “quantum-ness” of the underlying fields.

***

"The Universe, at a fundamental level, isn’t just made of quantized packets of matter and energy, but the fields that permeate the Universe are inherently quantum as well. It’s why practically every physicist fully expects that, at some level, gravitation must be quantized as well. General Relativity, our current theory of gravity, functions in the same way that an old-style classical field does: it curves the backdrop of space, and then quantum interactions occur in that curved space. Without a quantized gravitational field, however, we can be certain we’re overlooking quantum gravitational effects that ought to exist, even if we aren’t certain of what all of them are.

"In the end, we’ve learned that quantum mechanics is fundamentally flawed on its own. That’s not because of anything weird or spooky that it brought along with it, but because it wasn’t quite weird enough to account for the physical phenomena that actually occur in reality. Particles do indeed have inherently quantum properties, but so do fields: all of them relativistically invariant. Even without a current quantum theory of gravity, it’s all but certain that every aspect of the Universe, particles and fields alike, are themselves quantum in nature. What that means for reality, exactly, is something we’re still trying to puzzle out."

Comment: an enormous article with much preliminary explanations. We still don't understand the underpinnings of our reality. It is quantum all the way down, just like the turtles.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-is-a-photon

"Planck explained some puzzling behaviors of radiation by describing the energy of electromagnetic waves as divided into individual packets. In 1905, Albert Einstein built on Planck’s concept of energy packets and finally settled the corpuscule-versus-wave debate—by declaring it a tie.

"As Einstein explained, light behaves as both a particle and a wave, with the energy of each particle of light corresponding to the frequency of the wave.

"His evidence came from studies of the photoelectric effect—the way in which light knocked electrons loose from metal. If light traveled only in a continuous wave, then shining a light on metal for long enough would always dislodge an electron, because the energy the light transferred to the electron would accumulate over time.

***

"The way that scientists think about photons has continued to evolve in more recent years. For one, the photon is now known as a “gauge boson.”

"Gauge bosons are force-carrying particles that enable matter particles to interact via the fundamental forces. Atoms, for example, stick together because the positively charged protons in their nuclei exchange photons with the negatively charged electrons that orbit them—an interaction via the electromagnetic force.

"Secondly, the photon is now thought of as a particle, a wave, and an excitation—kind of like a wave—in a quantum field.

***

"Radio waves and microwaves; infrared and ultraviolet light; X-rays and gamma rays: All of these are light, and all of them are made up of photons.

"Photons are at work all around you. They travel through connected fibers to deliver internet, cable and cell phone signals. They are used in plastics upcycling, to break down objects into small building blocks that can be used in new materials. They are used in hospitals, in beams that target and destroy cancerous tissues.

"And they are key to all kinds of scientific research.

***

"In 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson by studying its decay into pairs of photons.

"Physicist Donna Strickland won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for her work developing ultrashort, high-intensity laser pulses, formed from highly focused high-energy light.

"Machines called light sources create intense beams of X-rays, ultraviolet light and infrared light to help scientists break down the steps of the fastest chemical processes and examine materials in molecular detail.

***

“'Light—photons—are a reagent in chemistry that people don’t always think about,” Dionne says. “People often think about adding new chemicals to enable a certain reaction or controlling the temperature or pH of a solution. Light can bring a whole new dimension and an entirely new tool kit.”

"Some physicists are even looking for new types of photons. Theoretical “dark photons” would serve as a new kind of gauge bosons, mediating the interactions between particles of dark matter."

Comment: This article shows how photons are so basic to particle physics and standard model cosmology .

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-2...

"Over the last decade, quantum physicists have been exploring the implications of a strange realization: In principle, both versions of the story can happen at once. That is, events can occur in an indefinite causal order, where both “A causes B” and “B causes A” are simultaneously true.

***

"The possibility follows from the quantum phenomenon known as superposition, where particles maintain all possible realities simultaneously until the moment they’re measured. In labs in Austria, China, Australia and elsewhere, physicists observe indefinite causal order by putting a particle of light (called a photon) in a superposition of two states. They then subject one branch of the superposition to process A followed by process B, and subject the other branch to B followed by A. In this procedure, known as the quantum switch, A’s outcome influences what happens in B, and vice versa; the photon experiences both causal orders simultaneously.

***

"With the emerging frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined causality,” Brukner said.

***

"The operational question is: In quantum gravity, what can we, in principle, observe? Hardy thought about the fact that quantum mechanics and general relativity each have a radical feature. Quantum mechanics is famously indeterministic; its superpositions allow for simultaneous possibilities. General relativity, meanwhile, suggests that space and time are malleable. In Einstein’s theory, massive objects like Earth stretch the space-time “metric” — essentially the distance between hash marks on a ruler, and the duration between ticks of clocks. The nearer you are to a massive object, for instance, the slower your clock ticks. The metric then determines the “light cone” of a nearby event — the region of space-time that the event can causally influence.

***

"What we normally think of as causal relationships — such as photons traveling from one region of the sky to another, correlating measurements made in the first region with measurements made later in the second region — act, in Hardy’s formalism, like data compression. There’s a reduction in the amount of information needed to describe the whole system, since one set of probabilities determines another.

"Hardy called his new formalism the “causaloid” framework, where the causaloid is the mathematical object used to calculate the probabilities of outcomes of any measurement in any region. He introduced the general framework in a dense 68-page paper in 2005, which showed how to formulate quantum theory in the framework (essentially by reducing its general probability expressions to the specific case of interacting quantum bits).

***

"In “the most beautiful experiment” done so far, according to Rubino, Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei demonstrated in 2019 that two parties can compare long strings of bits exponentially more efficiently when transmitting bits in both directions at once rather than in a fixed causal order — an advantage proposed by Brukner and co-authors in 2016. A different group in Hefei reported in January that, whereas engines normally need a hot and cold reservoir to work, with a quantum switch they could extract heat from reservoirs of equal temperature — a surprising use suggested a year ago by Oxford theorists.

***

"In a key paper in 2019, Magdalena Zych, Brukner and collaborators proved that this situation would allow Alice and Bob to achieve indefinite causal order.

***

"A “quantum equivalence principle” analogous to the equivalence principle that, a century ago, showed Einstein the way to general relativity. One way of stating Einstein’s equivalence principle is that even though space-time can wildly stretch and curve, local patches of it (such as the inside of a falling elevator) look flat and classical, and Newtonian physics applies. “The equivalence principle allowed you to find the old physics inside the new physics,” Hardy said. “That gave Einstein just enough.”

***

"But ultimately quantum gravity must be specific — answering not just the question “What can we observe?” but also “What exists?” That is, what are the quantum building blocks of gravity, space and time?

***

"Hardy thinks his causaloid framework might be compatible with loops or strings, potentially suggesting how to formulate those theories in a way that doesn’t envision objects evolving against a fixed background time. “We’re trying to find different routes up the mountain,” he said. He suspects that the surest route to quantum gravity is the one that “has at its heart this idea of indefinite causal structure.'”

Comment: all of this is at the quantum level of reality, not our level. Only we see causality

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/proton-antimatter-lopsided-quark-antiquark

"The proton’s antimatter is out of whack. An imbalance between two types of antiparticles that seethe within the proton is even wonkier than previously thought, a new measurement indicates.

"Protons are built from t­hree quarks — two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. But they also contain a roiling sea of transient quarks and antiquarks that fluctuate into existence before swiftly annihilating one another. Within that sea, down antiquarks outnumber up antiquarks, measurements revealed in the 1990s. And that lopsidedness persists in a realm of quark momenta previously unexplored, researchers report.

"...new tests, made by slamming protons into targets made of hydrogen and deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus), contradict that idea. SeaQuest researchers found that down antiquarks were about 50 percent more prevalent than up antiquarks — even when a single antiquark carried nearly half the proton’s total momentum.

"The measurements are important for studies at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, which slams protons together to look for new phenomena. To fully understand the collisions, physicists need a thorough accounting of the proton’s constituents. “They need to know what they’re colliding,” says study coauthor Paul Reimer of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill."

Comment: Why the human complaint of 'imbalance'? What we find is what God correctly wanted to be present. And we simply need to measure without doubting.

Another take:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/protons-antimatter-revealed-by-decades-old-experiment-20...

In reality, the proton’s interior swirls with a fluctuating number of six kinds of quarks, their oppositely charged antimatter counterparts (antiquarks), and “gluon” particles that bind the others together, morph into them and readily multiply. Somehow, the roiling maelstrom winds up perfectly stable and superficially simple — mimicking, in certain respects, a trio of quarks. “How it all works out, that’s quite frankly something of a miracle,” said Donald Geesaman, a nuclear physicist.

***

The data immediately favors two theoretical models of the proton sea. “This is the first real evidence backing up those models that has come out,” said Reimer.

One is the “pion cloud” model, a popular, decades-old approach that emphasizes the proton’s tendency to emit and reabsorb particles called pions, which belong to a group of particles known as mesons. The other model, the so-called statistical model, treats the proton like a container full of gas.

Planned future experiments will help researchers choose between the two pictures. But whichever model is right, SeaQuest’s hard data about the proton’s inner antimatter will be immediately useful, especially for physicists who smash protons together at nearly light speed in Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. When they know exactly what’s in the colliding objects, they can better piece through the collision debris looking for evidence of new particles or effects.

***

In the ultimate quest to understand the proton, the deciding factor might be its spin, or intrinsic angular momentum. A muon scattering experiment in the late 1980s showed that the spins of the proton’s three valence quarks account for no more than 30% of the proton’s total spin. The “proton spin crisis” is: What contributes the other 70%? Once again, said Brown, the Fermilab old-timer, “something else must be going on.”

***

Alberg and Miller are working on calculations of the full “meson cloud” surrounding protons, which includes, along with pions, rarer “rho mesons.” Pions don’t possess spin, but rho mesons do, so they must contribute to the overall spin of the proton in a way Alberg and Miller hope to determine.

Comment: Note the difference in two authors. The former sounds puzzled. The latter simply describes clarifying research. Moral: know how to interpret what you read in studying scientific reporting. Author bias will show if you are careful.

https://aeon.co/essays/is-everything-made-of-particles-fields-or-both-combined?utm_sour...

"Physicists deftly shift between different pictures of reality as it suits the task at hand. The textbooks are written to teach you how to use the mathematical tools of physics most effectively, not to tell you what things the equations are describing. It takes hard work to distil a story about what’s really happening in nature from the mathematics. This kind of research is considered ‘philosophy of physics’ when done by philosophers and ‘foundations of physics’ when done by physicists.

***

"Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear what replaces the atoms of the periodic table in the standard model. Are the fundamental building blocks of reality quantum particles, quantum fields, or some combination of the two?

***

"On 8 August, at the 2019 International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Prague, I joined four other philosophers of physics for a debate – tersely titled ‘Particles, Fields, or Both?’ Mathias Frisch of the Leibniz University Hannover opened our session with a presentation of the debate between Einstein and Ritz (see his Aeon essay, ‘Why Things Happen’). Then, the remaining three speakers defended opposing views – updated versions of the positions held by Einstein, Ritz, and Faraday.

***

"The part of the standard model that describes electrons and the electromagnetic field is called ‘quantum electrodynamics’, as it is the quantum version of classical electrodynamics. The foundations of the two subjects are closely linked.

***

"In my contribution to the debate, I advocated a different point of view on quantum electrodynamics. Following Faraday, I argued that we should get rid of particles and just have fields. However, I don’t think the electromagnetic field alone is enough. We need another field as well: the Dirac field. It is this field that represents the electron (and also the antiparticle of the electron, the positron).

"In classical electrodynamics, this approach replaces the point electron particle with a spread-out lump of energy and charge in the Dirac field. Because the charge is spread out, the electromagnetic field that is produced by this charge will not get infinitely strong at any point in space. That makes the self-interaction problem less severe. But it is not solved. If the electron’s charge is spread out, why don’t the various parts of the electron repel one another so that the electron rapidly explodes? That’s something I’m still working to understand.

***

"If you think of electrons as particles, you’ll have to think of photons differently – either eliminating them (Lazarovici’s story) or treating them as a field (Hubert’s story). On the other hand, if you think of electrons as a field, then you can think of photons the same way. I see this consistency as a virtue of the all-fields picture.

"As things stand, the three-sided debate between Einstein, Ritz and Faraday remains unresolved. We’ve certainly made progress, but we don’t have a definitive answer. It is not yet clear what classical and quantum electrodynamics are telling us about reality. Is everything made of particles, fields or both?

"This question is not front and centre in contemporary physics research. Theoretical physicists generally think that we have a good-enough understanding of quantum electrodynamics to be getting on with, and now we need to work on developing new theories and finding ways to test them through experiments and observations.

"That might be the path forward. However, sometimes progress in physics requires first backing up to reexamine, reinterpret and revise the theories that we already have. To do this kind of research, we need scholars who blend the roles of physicist and philosopher, as was done thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece."

Comment: We still don't know the real basis of the reality that was created by......fill in your blank, and most cosmological physicists don't care because the equations work just fine in unexplained ways. It would be nice to know and there might be reasonable explanation instead of so much confusion. The Creator works in very mysterious ways.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-tunnel-shows-particles-can-break-the-speed-of-li...

"Physicists quickly saw that particles’ ability to tunnel through barriers solved many mysteries. It explained various chemical bonds and radioactive decays and how hydrogen nuclei in the sun are able to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse, producing sunlight.

But physicists became curious — mildly at first, then morbidly so. How long, they wondered, does it take for a particle to tunnel through a barrier?

***

"In 1907, Albert Einstein realized that his brand-new theory of relativity must render faster-than-light communication impossible. Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, moving apart at high speed. Because of relativity, their clocks tell different times. One consequence is that if Alice sends a faster-than-light signal to Bob, who immediately sends a superluminal reply to Alice, Bob’s reply could reach Alice before she sent her initial message. “The achieved effect would precede the cause,” Einstein wrote.

***

"It wasn’t until 1962 that a semiconductor engineer at Texas Instruments named Thomas Hartman wrote a paper that explicitly embraced the shocking implications of the math.

"Hartman found that a barrier seemed to act as a shortcut. When a particle tunnels, the trip takes less time than if the barrier weren’t there. Even more astonishing, he calculated that thickening a barrier hardly increases the time it takes for a particle to tunnel across it. This means that with a sufficiently thick barrier, particles could hop from one side to the other faster than light traveling the same distance through empty space.

***

"In short, quantum tunneling seemed to allow faster-than-light travel, a supposed physical impossibility.

***

"The researchers reported that the rubidium atoms spent, on average, 0.61 milliseconds inside the barrier, in line with Larmor clock times theoretically predicted in the 1980s. That’s less time than the atoms would have taken to travel through free space. Therefore, the calculations indicate that if you made the barrier really thick, Steinberg said, the speedup would let atoms tunnel from one side to the other faster than light.

"In the most highly praised measurement yet, reported in Nature in July, Steinberg’s group in Toronto used what’s called the Larmor clock method to gauge how long rubidium atoms took to tunnel through a repulsive laser field.

***

"In a paper published in the New Journal of Physics in September, Pollak and two colleagues argued that superluminal tunneling doesn’t allow superluminal signaling for a statistical reason: Even though tunneling through an extremely thick barrier happens very fast, the chance of a tunneling event happening through such a barrier is extraordinarily low. A signaler would always prefer to send the signal through free space."

Comment: It is allowed because it doesn't contain information!!!! Another weird explanation, but the scientist seem satisfied.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/understanding-quantum-mechanics-6-its.html

"One of the most common misunderstandings about quantum mechanics that I encounter is that quantum mechanics is about small things and short distances. It’s about atomic spectral lines, electrons going through double slits, nuclear decay, and so on. There’s a realm of big things where stuff behaves like we’re used to, and then there’s a realm of small things, where quantum weirdness happens. It’s an understandable misunderstanding because we do not experience quantum effects in daily life.

"The best example of a big quantum thing is the sun. The sun shines thanks to nuclear fusion, which relies on quantum tunneling. You have to fuse two nuclei together even though they repel each other because they are both positively charged. Without tunneling, this would not work. And the sun certainly is not small.

"Ah, you may say, that doesn’t count because the fusion itself only happens on short distances. It’s just that the sun contains a lot of matter so it’s big.

"Ok. Here is another example. All that matter around you, air, walls, table, what have you, is only there because of quantum mechanics. Without quantum mechanics, atoms would not exist. Indeed, this was one of the major reasons for the invention of quantum mechanics in the first place.

"You see, without quantum mechanics, an electron circling around the atomic nucleus would emit electromagnetic radiation, lose energy, and fall into the nucleus very quickly. So, atoms would be unstable. Quantum mechanics explains why this does not happen. It’s because the electrons are not particles that are localized at a specific point, they are instead described by wave-functions which merely tell you the probability for the electron to be at a particular point. And for atoms this probability distribution is focused on shells around the nucleus. These shells correspond to different energy levels and are also called the “orbitals” of the electron, but I find that somewhat misleading. It’s not like the electron is actually orbiting as in going around in a loop.

***

"So, all the matter around us is evidence that quantum mechanics works because it’s necessary to make atoms stable. Does that finally convince you that quantum mechanics isn’t just about small things? Ah, you may say, but all this normal matter does not look like a quantum thing.

***

"Zeilinger and his group did this experiment between two of the Canary Islands in 2008. They produced pairs of entangled photons on La Palma, sent one of each pair to Tenerife, which is one-hundred-forty-four kilometers away, and let the other photon do circles in an optical fibre on La Palma. When they measured the polarization on both photons, they could unambiguously demonstrate that they were still entangled.

***

"But the relevant point is that there is no limit in size or weight or distance where quantum effects suddenly stop. In principle, everything has quantum effects, even you. It’s just that those effects are so small you don’t notice."

Comment: So to quantum physicists it is not so counterintuative at all. And it has to be that way or we wouldn't be alive. It seems God knows what He is doing as He designs, even if He has to put up with errors in living biochemistry.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-renormalization-saved-particle-physics-20200917/

"Only by using a technique dubbed “renormalization,” which involved carefully concealing infinite quantities, could researchers sidestep bogus predictions. The process worked, but even those developing the theory suspected it might be a house of cards resting on a tortured mathematical trick.

“'It is what I would call a dippy process,” Richard Feynman later wrote. “Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent.”

"Justification came decades later from a seemingly unrelated branch of physics. Researchers studying magnetization discovered that renormalization wasn’t about infinities at all. Instead, it spoke to the universe’s separation into kingdoms of independent sizes, a perspective that guides many corners of physics today.

***

"Today, Feynman’s “dippy process” has become as ubiquitous in physics as calculus, and its mechanics reveal the reasons for some of the discipline’s greatest successes and its current challenges. During renormalization, complicated submicroscopic capers tend to just disappear. They may be real, but they don’t affect the big picture. “Simplicity is a virtue,” Fendley said. “There is a god in this.”

"That mathematical fact captures nature’s tendency to sort itself into essentially independent worlds. When engineers design a skyscraper, they ignore individual molecules in the steel. Chemists analyze molecular bonds but remain blissfully ignorant of quarks and gluons. The separation of phenomena by length, as quantified by the renormalization group, has allowed scientists to move gradually from big to small over the centuries, rather than cracking all scales at once.

"Yet at the same time, renormalization’s hostility to microscopic details works against the efforts of modern physicists who are hungry for signs of the next realm down. The separation of scales suggests they’ll need to dig deep to overcome nature’s fondness for concealing its finer points from curious giants like us.

“'Renormalization helps us simplify the problem,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. But “it also hides what happens at short distances. You can’t have it both ways.'”

Comment: Quantum theory is as weird as ever, but it works. The universe is based on quantum mechanics, which tells us God works in mysterious ways. We are bright folks who always want to know how it works. Hopefully we'll figure it out.

http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/how-to-make-sense-of-quantum-physics

"The mistake physicists made decades ago was to draw the wrong conclusion from a mathematical theorem proved by John Bell in 1964. This theorem shows that in any theory in which hidden variables let us predict measurement outcomes, the correlations between measurement outcomes obey a bound. Since then, countless experiments have shown that this bound can be violated. It follows that the type of hidden variables theories to which Bell’s Theorem applies are falsified. The conclusion that physicists drew is that quantum theory is correct and hidden variables not.

"But Bell’s Theorem makes an assumption which is itself unsupported by evidence: That the hidden variables (whatever they are) are independent of the settings of the detector. This assumption—called “statistical independence”—is reasonable as long as an experiment only involves large objects like pills, mice, or cancer cells. (And indeed, in this case a violation of statistical independence would strongly suggest the experiment had been tampered with.) Whether it holds for quantum particles, however, no one knows. Because of this we can equally well conclude that the experiments which test Bell’s Theorem, rather than supporting quantum theory, have proved that statistical independence is violated.

"Hidden variables theories that violate statistical independence give Superdeterminism its name. Shockingly enough, they have never been ruled out. They have never even been experimentally tested because that would require a different type of experiment than what physicists have done so far. To test Superdeterminism, one would have to look for evidence that quantum physics is not as random as we think it is.

"The core idea of Superdeterminism is that everything in the universe is related to everything else because the laws of nature prohibit certain configurations of particles (or make them so unlikely that for all practical purposes they never occur). If you had an empty universe and placed one particle in it, then you could not place the other ones arbitrarily. They’d have to obey certain relations to the first.

"This universal relatedness means in particular that if you want to measure the properties of a quantum particle, then this particle was never independent of the measurement apparatus. This is not because there is any interaction happening between the apparatus and the particle. The dependence between both is simply a property of nature that, however, goes unnoticed if one deals only with large devices. If this was so, quantum measurements had definite outcomes—hence solving the measurement problem—while still giving rise to violations of Bell’s bound. Suddenly it all makes sense!

***

"Due to the dearth of research, we have to date no generally applicable theory for Superdeterminism. We do have some models that provide a basis for understanding the violation of the Bell inequality, but no formalism remotely as flexible as the existing theory of quantum mechanics. While Superdeterminism makes some predictions that are largely model-independent, such that measurement outcomes should be less randomly distributed than in quantum mechanics, it is easy to criticize such predictions because they are not based on a full-blown theory. Experimentalists do not want to even test the idea because they do not take it seriously. But we are unlikely to find evidence of Superdeterminism by chance. Universal relatedness, which is this idea’s defining feature, does not reveal itself on the level of elementary particles. Therefore, we do not believe that probing smaller and smaller distances with bigger and bigger particle accelerators will help solve the still-open fundamental questions.

"It does not help that most physicists today have been falsely taught the measurement problem has been solved, or erroneously think that hidden variables have been ruled out. If anything is mind-boggling about quantum mechanics, it’s that physicists have almost entirely ignored the most obvious way to solve its problems."

Comment: This simply says every thing in the universe is connected and affects everything else. We've really known this about split particles that can connect across the universe. What if all particles are somehow related? Which brings me back to God's abilities. He can conjure up quantum confusion which ties us in mental knots with its complexity and counterintuativeness. In living biochemistry which is not a controllable entity, in the same way that physics processes are, errors can occur and some don't fully appreciate the differences and either blame God for these errors or somehow think He purposely planned them. The plain reasoning is God fully knew what He was doing and knew errors would occur, proved by all the editing mechanisms He designed.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-evidence-quantum-world-stranger-thought.html

"New experimental evidence of a collective behavior of electrons to form "quasiparticles" called "anyons" has been reported by a team of scientists at Purdue University.

"Anyons have characteristics not seen in other subatomic particles, including exhibiting fractional charge and fractional statistics that maintain a "memory" of their interactions with other quasiparticles by inducing quantum mechanical phase changes.

***

"Before the growing evidence of anyons in 2020, physicists had categorized particles in the known world into two groups: fermions and bosons. Electrons are an example of fermions, and photons, which make up light and radio waves, are bosons. One characteristic difference between fermions and bosons is how the particles act when they are looped, or braided, around each other. Fermions respond in one straightforward way, and bosons in another expected and straightforward way.

"Anyons respond as if they have a fractional charge, and even more interestingly, create a nontrivial phase change as they braid around one another. This can give the anyons a type of "memory" of their interaction.

"'Anyons only exist as collective excitations of electrons under special circumstances," Manfra said. "But they do have these demonstrably cool properties including fractional charge and fractional statistics. It is funny, because you think, 'How can they have less charge than the elementary charge of an electron?' But they do."

***

"Anyons display this behavior only as collective crowds of electrons, where many electrons behave as one under very extreme and specific conditions, so they are not thought to be found isolated in nature, Nakamura said.

"'Normally in the world of physics, we think about fundamental particles, such as protons and electrons, and all of the things that make up the periodic table," he said. "But we study the existence of quasiparticles, which emerge from a sea of electrons that are placed in certain extreme conditions."

"Because this behavior depends on the number of times the particles are braided, or looped, around each other, they are more robust in their properties than other quantum particles. This characteristic is said to be topological because it depends on the geometry of the system and may eventually lead to much more sophisticated anyon structures that could be used to build stable, topological quantum computers."

Comment: our reality is based upon a foundation of quantum mechanics. We are finding very strange reactions under conditions that do not appear in nature as we know it. Will our research solve our confusion or make it worse? Only God knows.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

Abstract

In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of ≲ 7.4×10. . This experiment pushes back to at least ∼7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today.

Comment: I've never doubted free will. And once again we see consciousness affecting quantum mechanics