Double Slit Experiment No Mystery
Physicist here. This is just self-congratulatory nonsense. Though I shouldn&#x27;t be surprised, because I originally signed up for this site to comment against some other self-congratulatory nonsense.<p>Quantum mechanics is built on extraordinarily simple rules, in fact simpler ones than classical mechanics: all you do is sum up the amplitudes for various paths, and square it to get a probability. The problem is that the objects obeying these rules thus act <i>neither</i> like particles <i>nor</i> waves. So obsessing over whether quantum objects are &quot;really&quot; particles or waves is not useful.<p>It certainly works sometimes. There are many limits where quantum objects behave just like particles, or just like waves (there must be, since we must be able to recover classical mechanics from quantum mechanics). And sometimes you can <i>describe</i> a quantum calculation in terms of classical wave or particle intuition, which is what&#x27;s going on here. The double slit experiment is in fact so simple that I know of at least 5 ways to derive the result, using all sorts of different intuition. &quot;Duane&#x27;s law&quot; is one of them, though I never knew it had a name, as it pops out rather straightforwardly from the mathematics.<p>The reason that we don&#x27;t try to extend this to cover all of quantum mechanics is because it doesn&#x27;t work. Treating the quantum mechanics as if it were classical underneath leads to all kinds of paradoxes. Bell inequality violations tell us that the classical variables would have to either influence each other faster than light, or be pre-set since the beginning of the universe in a malicious conspiracy. The delayed choice quantum eraser tells us that if you want to treat the photon as a classical particle, you need to accept that it can <i>retroactively change the past</i>. Yet another failed attempt is quantum logic: if you insist on treating quantum superpositions as representing some unknown classical position of a particle, you need propositions about those positions to <i>violate the rules of logic themselves</i>.<p>Hundreds of experiments probing quantum mechanics have been performed, all with the same results: committing to a classical ontology in terms of &quot;waves&quot; or &quot;particles&quot; costs you more than just accepting that quantum objects are different from either.<p>Physicists have spent a <i>lot</i> of energy thinking about this. All of the author&#x27;s claims were under active debate in the 1920s. He is just completely ignoring the following century of investigation, and claiming that it never happened!