The Theory of Elementary Waves
A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics
by Lewis E. Little   

Endnotes

  
These are the endnotes for
It's Elementary, Dean M. Sandin's discussion of —

The Theory of Elementary Waves
A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics
by Lewis E. Little
  

  

1. Lewis E. Little, "The Theory of Elementary Waves", Physics Essays, 9, no 1 (March 1996): 100-132. Another early presentation of the theory was a talk by Dr. Little at Caltech in February 2000. As of this writing, it is available for viewing (in 18 parts) at http://www.YouTube.com/user/tewlipdotcom. Return to text
     
2. "Authority" here does not presuppose institutional credentials or peer approval. That would be putting it backwards. As a root concept that subsumes the forms of authority in all its wide-ranging guises, "authority" is a corollary of the marriage of human reason with human action: the virtue invested in someone who has discovered how to understand reality in some realm and respect, and how to act accordingly for the better. Dr. Little is indeed formally trained in the ideas and applications of physics, with his MA from Princeton and his PhD from NYU, but this fact is not essential to his claim to our attention. Return to text
     
3. Let there be no illusion that Lewis E. Little offers his theory simply to supplant the orthodoxy of the day in some collegial, evaluation-suppressing fashion. He is attacking the orthodoxy of the day as an offense to reason. He would hardly say that conventional quantum theory and elementary wave theory are two rational alternatives with the evidence possibly supporting either but his own theory being far, far better. To uproot an entire system growing from the soil of basic conceptual error so that the correct system can grow, one must remove and replace the offending soil. Opportunities for this are seized throughout the book. Return to text
     
4. "Nonlocality" is sometimes also used in a restricted sense pertaining to any conjectured interaction involving faster-than-light influence. No evidence for such a thing is known. But regardless of whether this idea can be reconciled with the physics of relativity, in accounting for the nonlocal aspects of QM no less than an infinite "velocity" will do. Return to text
     
5. A primary example of doomed attempts to preserve objective trajectories is David Bohm's well known, self-styled "ontological" approach via his explicitly nonlocal "quantum potential". Return to text
     
6. Letter to Richard Bentley. See http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THEM00258 . Return to text
     
7. Yes, it does turn out that the orbit of Mercury subtly flouts Newtonian law and ultimately obeys only general relativity. Return to text
     
8. There is at least one more loose end: how to account for the entire history of the wave-following by a particle that was emitted at some "remote" distance (think even of intergalactic light). The wave organization imposed by the detector could not have been involved in that emission. The process is well discussed in Dr. Little's 1996 paper, but is not fully touched on when mentioned later in Chapter 7 of The Theory of Elementary Waves. Suffice it to say that to explain a particle of remote origin eventually being detected, it is necessary to regard it as "jumping into coherence" with each of the successive new flux organizations it encounters along the way, with these "jumps" ensuring that the particle's behavior under the influence of the detector at close range will be exactly as if the detector's wave state had been present over the whole path. A chief consequence of this for photons in particular is that of preserving the constancy of their velocity over the whole trip. Return to text
     
9. Thus a flight into incredible rationalism: the "many worlds" interpretation. Quantum mechanics is unable to resist its eligibility for consideration, because it is a logical consequence of having forward waves. It treats all of existence itself as an ever-evolving, never-collapsing über-wave, developing into an ever-growing infinitude of specific universes for every quantum possibility at every location. Return to text
     
10. I mean "magic" literally, not hyperbolically. This usage occurs in discussion of this topic even by great physicists. Einstein's view aside, when DeBroglie and Schrödinger were playing their noteworthy parts in the development of QM in the 1920s, they too solidly rejected as supernatural the purported instantaneous connections between objects that was being claimed early on. See New Perspectives in Physics by Louis DeBroglie, Basic Books, 1962, pg. 172: "According to Schrödinger, only magic could explain this phenomenon, and 'magic' is, in fact, the only word to describe it." Return to text
      
11. It may prevent confusion to note here that Dr. Little was forced to scrap the TEW explanation of double-delayed choice that appeared in his 1996 paper. Likewise with a first attempt to fix it. His final account is available at http://physics.prodos.org/ddcexplained.pdf. A shorter, less technical presentation of this account is used in the book (section 6.3). It should be obvious that such error-correction is a normal part of the development of broad theory. Return to text
      
12. A detailed look at how the elementary waves can interact among themselves, and at how they can determine complex particle behavior, awaits us in Chapter 12's account of the physics of the atom. Return to text
      
13. For the curious, these oscillations have a period inversely proportional to the particle mass: h / mc². Return to text
      
14. Terming the vecton picture of electromagnetism a "start" is not in the least dismissive. Dr. Little has stated on the TEWLIP forum, "A vecton is a (somewhat speculative) theoretical model of the particle photons responsible for electric and magnetic forces." (http://tewlip.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12#p25) Also, "The main import of the vecton theory as developed so far is the fact that all the diverse effects of electric and magnetic fields can be reduced to this simple push vector picture." (http://tewlip.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8&start=0#p15) Return to text
      
15. Even the simple electric field is necessarily fictional. Its being electrostatic is a fluke of the frame of reference selected for observing it. In general, there will be both electric and magnetic field components (strictly related by an invariant-interval formula in special relativity), and we have seen that under any physical theory the magnetic component is necessarily an abstraction. Return to text
      
16. This cancellation applies to fermions. All other particles are "bosons" (which include photons). The opposite effect occurs with these. Their emitted elementary wave organization is precisely in phase with the wave being followed, producing totally constructive interference, which enhances the wave's power to stimulate more of the bosons into its state (as with lasers). The TEW explanation of fermion vs. boson behavior accounts for the subject of quantum statistics. Return to text

© 2009 Dean M. Sandin