What's Wrong with Quantum Mechanics / Apology: Existence of Proton (& others)

0:00 I've got quite a lot of ideas but they're all quite incipient. So I got as far as probably about a third of the way through and so I'll read this third and point out a few things. So first of all, I was, are you here, if I speak at this level, this is, that's fine, okay. So just to introduce myself, my first degree was in mathematics. And that was quite a long time ago. I then began a PhD in history and philosophy of mathematics. It was abandoned. The first chapter was published under the title of Who Carved Up the Integers? They Never Died. Who Carved Up the Integers? They Never Died. I was referring to the progress of mathematics. Obviously a lot was gained. Yeah, a lot was gained, but... There was a lot lost. One of the big things was ontology that was actually, you know, I mean, it was limited, but there wasn't an ontology and actually the aim of having a philosophy of an ontology was just, it was so exciting what could happen, got on with. Yes, so since then I've been a fairly dedicated mother of three and sometimes four children. For the last seven years I've also been a craniosacral. Now, feeling that I have a little bit more time, I've been wanting to come back into this area, and coming here and reading the literature is, for me, actually kind of like dipping in to see where I would like to kind of go in this thing that last night I picked up one of the AMPA West 13 that I hadn't seen before, who seems to be somebody who would be good at some ideas along the same lines as me.

2:30 So, yeah, so I want to just... I've sent a few ideas or questions that some of you may find interesting or relevant. Idea is the psychological, alchemical idea that when we work outside ourselves, we're also working on ourselves. That what we learn about the outside world is also a learning about our inner world. Newton was an alchemist. His alchemical work was concurrent with Principia. ...and cannot be dismissed as a product of his dotage. Alchemy externally was an attempt to turn base metal into gold. Internally, it was a spiritual work of self-development. Pythagoras also was an esoteric spiritual teacher, and he in fact coined the term mathematics. He was tar-mathemata, which means those things which have been learned. This learning was not merely an abstract mental learning, A psychological spiritual meaning that we're not aware of. It seems to me that in the absence of our consciously embracing the twin aspects of our intellectual, mathematical and scientific endeavours, products, the fruits have become like dreams and can be interpreted in the quasi, obviously doesn't deny their power in the external world, they've derived some huge power of the natural numbers.

5:00 Consciously embracing this other part does account to some extent for the way in which the products of mathematical and scientific work have developed and run out of control of humanity. Disastrous effects, atom bombs. And it seems to me that one could see humanity's experimentation, or scientific technological powers, the experimentation of a child. If I drop this, what will happen? How can I build these bricks? And there's this huge kind of, oh, if I do this, I do that. But not thinking of a larger context, not self-reflecting. If I do this, gosh, I'm in a big state on mummy's carpet. I think the analogy may stand a close approximation, but I haven't actually. And so for me, what happens in Newtonian physics is like that. Many, many tackles have been allowed to play around. Then Mother Nature comes in and says, hang on, you can't just be a moon, you know, you think you're just looking, you are actually doing the history of science like a fairy tale, like a dream. But I think this is, I think, I mean, there is that sense that to the extent that we are not even in conscious, conscious mental state of fullest, then I think there's a sense.

7:30 And I think people in this conference have made remarks like it's the physicist's job to do this, and the philosopher's job to do that, and the linguist's job to do this, etc. My feeling is that now it's actually the job of all of us to become more fully responsible. I think that is the stage that we're at. We've seen what happens when scientists don't take responsibility for their knowledge. So I see that, I think that actually there is to be done which is reclaiming and reinterpreting this mathematical science, psychological or sociopsychological, seeing what this other meaning, there is more meaning than just what happens outside. And I think it's part of where we are in humanity now. So that's a bit that I actually managed to write. And I see the above, I consider this a spiritual work. Now I have a, my working definition of spirit is having a sense of being aware of part of which one could call, it's that sense.

10:00 I was interested in what David was saying about reality. I thought maybe I'm in the wrong place again. I was thinking maybe I should be. People were thinking about defining life more than reality. It's about, but I actually don't think so. I mean, I actually think that the combinatorial hierarchy is very, very interesting. And I think that it is modeling something where you could start with saying, well, maybe this, where we are starting with is this oneness, this being called a godness, this something out of which something comes. Because when you go back to the very beginning, there is always, no, no, I just rushed a bit more, yes, put, yeah, the sort of, yeah, so... One thing that really, I mean, is vital is the question of what is our intention, what is our motivation in our mathematical. Self-awareness of these is vital now. Our perspectives, as David was saying, determine our experiments and hence the range of possibilities of our results. Again, I think within this group and within this kind of work, it can be considered pure research to the extent that... There isn't monetary gain, although there's always personal ambition, but the intention could be considered possibly to discover or create a more beautiful, elegant or deeper model of physical reality, which will mainstream one. I'd be interested to hear. It would seem a fairly laudable and at least harmless aim.

12:30 There's an increasing tendency for academic institutions to seek funding from this, and there's less and less research with that pure aim anyway, so it is a huge, huge pressure what people work on and what comes out. So in a way I think, we were talking about paradigm shifts, and I think in a way I'm more interested in a shift, generally, in mathematical scientific knowledge of how we place that. So the other couple of things that I just want, I would like to put mathematics itself, the kind of mathematics that we have now, which again is a very powerful mathematics. One of the, one thing about it is it is primarily derived from the visual sense. The visual sense, yeah. And I think that obviously, you know, this was the thing, you know, the move from alchemy to chemistry, you know, as Salman was mentioning yesterday, was, you know, clearly, you know, an important one. It was to do with being able to be quantitative.

15:00 In fact, certainly the kind of what we, mathematics and science, have been able to be very accurate, very quantifying things, allows that. It is much more difficult to work in the area of qualities to find that kind of precision. And it also, there's also then this question of the intersubjective creation of ideas. There's agreement, agreement of terms. I mean, you know, David again yesterday was saying, well, he found it really difficult to say, well, what is, because it's a very important concept. These, I mean, that's still within a very, you know, normal scientific paradigm. But even, you know, if you go sort of outside of that, then it becomes that, you know, even more difficult. It's full of very important qualities and values. And so this is the question of, oh, that's right, again, yes, so there was The question of language. It was something that came up in David's talk yesterday about how we are locked into our language. I don't know if anybody knows Benjamin Wolfe's work. He was a linguist in the... Lee Wolfe. Yes, Benjamin Lee Wolfe, that's right. In the 60s, particularly interested in the Hoppe language because it doesn't have tenses in the way that we do.

17:30 And so in fact, so it appears, so it seems closer to, has a different slant. Now we are locked in our language because it is very, very early. It was saying, well, is it possible? I think there is this idea that maybe it's not possible. I mean, I think that it is very difficult, but I think it is possible. And I think that the way it is through silence kind of way that one can be. And I think that is, in fact, I mean, in that connection, I was just going to mention, I thought I would mention the craniosacral therapy, also because there was this idea of talking about paranormal as well. So I had some experience of this through my work as a craniosacral therapist. I mean, I guess I don't know whether anybody, I guess most people don't know about craniosacral therapy. It's here and the sacrum is here. The top bone between is the spine. Inside the crane there is a cerebral spinal and this is a fluid which cushions the brain inside the skull and also runs down inside the spine and as with any fluid otherwise it would stagnate and there is a natural motion, a natural rhythm. It comes out, it's fascinating stuff.

20:00 It comes out of the blood-brain. We actually have oceans. They really are quite... You don't realise I'm talking about that. Anyway, so it comes out from the blood and goes back into the blood. One of the key ideas of Cranio is that the basic notion is to listen. That what you're doing is a body-led therapy rather than a mind-led therapy. You put your hands on what you feel guided to, because the important thing initially is to go into, and then you listen to the body, and you ask the body what you want. It seems to me that if there's a scientific account of it, explanation of it, then it would be at a quantum physical level, because it is actually the act of observation. I think that's really, those are the main things that I think I, I was going to say something about at Weisser and Constance. Can I just ask, do you think it would register anything?

22:30 Yeah, well I don't know, I mean the experiment, what has happened is that there's been The fact is that cranio-osteopaths and cranio-psychotherapists have noticed, in fact, normal medicine initially could not measure the movement of the plate, so initially they called cranio-osteopaths and cranio-psychotherapists in a sort of, what do they call them, quack. But that was because they actually didn't have fine enough instrumentation to measure it, so they can now measure some of the things that people have been feeling, have been palpating for. Like between the operator and the patient? No, the thing is that, I mean, I don't know whether that's happened. All I know is that work that cranial osteopaths and craniosacral therapists have done, We've discovered movements and have written stuff about it, which validates what we're saying, so the instrumentation has caught up. When you first began thinking, another one here, like this, but happily, yes, I'm sure everyone here thinks the same.

25:00 For example, topology, there are some non-quantitative that come out. In a way, I don't know, in a way I think to be done, and I think that actually, for me, I think there's a kind of two-fold thing of actually looking at the maths that has been done, I mean particularly number, from the Greek period on. And reclaiming is in a way the Pythagoreans, well not totally in the way the Pythagoreans were, but partly, partly, so that there was the quantitative, the study of the quantitative was called logisticae and that's what was, you know, grew tremendously, that was, you know, and then the other side was called arithmeticae and that was the study of each number in mathematical physics.

27:30 I'm not sure because I think, you see, I think that logic... Well, certainly logic as it's come down from Aristotelian logic, in fact. Well, it's got lost. I mean, the Logos is gone. Yes, I mean, Aristotle was very clear about the limitations of this one, but since then there hasn't been that clarity of their limitations, so... You see, it occurs to me that Heraclitus's idea of the Logos was that it was divine. The Logos. And I mean, we've got logic. I mean, we've got sociology, geology, this, that, and the origins of this we've lost. But it was originally divine in the way that he was saying. Yes, that is a very different thing. So it seems as though you're trying to take us back to square one, to take us back to this idea of the quantitative self.

30:00 I mean that might relate to logic as the word and as reason as opposed to logic which has become quite a narrow thing, it's very different. There's a great deal of her work. If you're really interested in that aspect of things, I think. I've tried to read it. It's interesting. But I have two or three initial points, and then I'm done. But that's something that you might at least find. I want to look at, of course, your, your, what, can you give a reference to that? Yeah, Marie-Helene Wiesel and Franz, but it's called numbers. No, Franz, it's called numbers. And I assume you're familiar with Jung's work on alchemy and Maria-Louise von Franz, because that is discussing in this disparage movement. It is, it is. What is it, von Franz? Von Franz, Maria-Louise von Franz. Maria-Louise von Franz. Maria-Louise von Franz. F-R-I-A-N-Z. F-R-I-A-N-Z. It's a fascinating book. She goes up to the number five from the one I always met. I should have got in touch with her before she died. How many pages? No, she's still a couple of hundred pages, but that was the number five. There's a lot, yeah.

32:30 Another point that you mentioned, which Clive also mentioned, as to social responsibility of work in science. Some of us were involved in the late 60s and early 70s in this very question, and at least my conclusion at the time was that before we could do anything about it, we would have, and in fact my work was aimed at, how could we develop political power in the community to allow us to do that. And of course, as you know, we've failed, and I don't see the climate of opinion. So I say, unless you can find a solution to the political problem... It's almost hopeless to talk about that. So that's my comment from some of the better experiences. So that was the second thing I wanted to just put on the table. It's a very difficult problem, but it's part of the sickness of the world. I have a remark by Professor Eyre about Bertrand Russell. He said, He went whizzing past vast issues with great clarity and wonderful speed. You did a bit of that yourself. If I can just drop a few pebbles in the palms of an engine. We don't, and I always know when I'm not solving it.

35:00 Because I get sort of, I think quite a few people work is based on greed, organized, so you combine that with a little, what they say to you is, you have to sink the Titanic before you get the lifeboats, aeroplanes fall out of the sky and we say, ah, that's what happens. Some of these things will get cured, but they won't get cured until it's so appallingly obvious to everybody, including the politicians. And by which time, of course, we'll have moved on to another subtle problem, which is ruininess. There's one thing also that I was reminded of, that the actual practice of using mathematics, field of engineering and so on, is, as near as I can tell, magical.

37:30 I mean, what do we actually do? I sit down at my desk... And apart from occasionally writing pieces of English, I write strange symbols on bits of paper and then and or instead I put them inside this luminous machine which looks at me and changes and I process them in strange ways and numbers or patterns come out and I give those to other people and they turn that by all sorts of strange transformations into hardware. And this bloody stuff works. And if that isn't the kind of magic we'd all be burnt at the stake for, I don't know what is. It is magical. And it's an interference with or getting into bed with nature which is now so evolved that it is magical. And I don't know how you'd stop us doing it. What I think is that this business of get out there and fix it some is a masculine thing and maybe we need a feminine side to that which there's not quite yet. Yes, I think there is a place for that. Do you think burning witches at the stake in fact is a really good idea? Could I just answer Tony or sort of come back to what you said a bit. Yes, I mean I think there is something. I mean, I actually like to bring in the visual because I think this is another thing that at one time, you know, it was, and now within the scientific world, it's heretic to mention gold. You know, I think one, to me there's, you know, I mean, to me it was very difficult to use the word god for a long time because it was very masculine to talk about life in that way, but it's that appreciation.

40:00 It's the appreciation of what, that we are given, that we are given life, that we are seen as plain beings, that we've done amazing things, that the earth is a lot bigger, a lot more amazing than us and what we've done. Yeah, so I think that, yes, so this magic is, and I think that is, and maybe there is a more subtle insight which does our place, you know, rather than, okay, hey, I've solved that one. And I think maybe that is part of it. ...in terms of the grandsons.

42:30 ...the way human beings behave. And I look at how civilization... We're suffering from overcrowding syndrome. Just consider what happens when you overcrowd animals, when you provide them with food. They become very aggressive. Both sexes become aggressive. The females become particularly aggressive. The males tend to homosexuality more than they normally would. Suddenly the females stop reproducing and start eating their young. There are parallels in the way modern society behaves. And you don't have to be overcrowded in the sense of people per square mile. It's interactions that help out. Yeah, I think that's interesting. Paul's been wanting to say something about that. Actually I wanted to respond to... Tony's earlier, he had given me that story at lunchtime, and more brilliantly, Tony, but I was just having this fanciful mental picture that, you know, we know somehow from antiquity we bring this image of the sorcery, the magic, the sort of archetypal idea, but it doesn't make sense. To me, someone has a book and he opens it and there is there a magic incantation. And he has to read it. Now he can't just run his hand over and say, okay, it won't work. He has to read it from beginning to end in exact words. And now the magic is in power. Now in science we understand this perfectly. This is what I do for a job. What am I living this?

45:00 I can't skip a step. They want to know how far, right, how fast, how big to make something. I have to go through this process. Linear. Go through this process. And then it happens. And indeed, I wonder if it isn't just like totally backward. Like, what I was going to say is that... In the dark ages or whatever, they were having a sort of dream of what the modern mind would be. It could also be that this is only, that this past idea of sorcery is only a projection of ours, of this aspect of what we do. Well, I certainly think that history and memory and... It's all, you know, it's all questionable, you know, it's all, I mean, we, that's to say that we extract from history just as we extract from our memories what we choose to, and this is, I mean, so for me, I mean, what, in a way, what is more important is what are we choosing to create. You know, we're doing exactly the dances. I see it. We're exactly doing it. We understand it, but in its own right, if you take it and separate it out, it makes no sense. It doesn't seem to make any sense until you're in it doing it. What I'd also say is that part of that story is of dark magic as well as white magic. Dark magic. That's quite scary. It's very interesting that the chap that I'm next to, the flat next to me here, is a professor of ethics from Australia and he's over here to work on a book, a research book, on the ethics of human clothing and I think there's this idea in science, look what we can do! Somehow, the stock mechanism, there's a lot of magic, well if it's magic it must be good.

47:30 And if there's money in it, definitely say we can do it, so we should do it, without thinking about the huge. We learn a lot of things the hard way. Most of the things we learn, we learn the hard way. Well, I started affirming for gentle lessons in my life. So, it's in a matter of time, Mr. Jess, if Bill wants to start us off again on a different... What, now? Yeah, and then we have a break after. Now, I don't want to talk for more than ten minutes. I'm mainly interested in your responses and your opinions. Alright, we'll hold you to that. Was that good? We'll hold you to that. How many of you have not heard my paper that I gave earlier? I'll miss this, I'll sort it.

50:00 The only thing I'd like to introduce and to find out from you is your attitudes toward some of my basic approaches. I'm a realist. What I want to do is put together a post-classical theory, incorporating, retaining relativistic covariance and invariance, retaining the experimental results of quantum mechanics, but getting rid of pictures of reality.

52:30 I don't have the information, and it describes it correctly. This has been used to actually create what really is teleportation photons. This has been used to study the separation over 100 Bohr radii, 100 atom radii with 50 N equals 50 Rydberg atoms. And to show and to detail the loss of incoherence, degree of freedom by degree of freedom, in fact, it gives a detailed picture of what Norman said had to go on when you make the transition from quantum to classical. And I don't see where the problem is at that level. I don't see it at the point where you can attack the logic. What is missing, it seems to me, is that was the whole point of Bell's work. As he said himself, this solved the EBR situation the way Einstein would like at least, and it's also very clear it's the way Bell liked at least.

55:00 But he was honest in presenting his work. He had found the opposite answer to what he had hoped, and he presented it in most of the work on quantum mechanics since. All of this has built on his work and he went to his grave profoundly dissatisfied with the realistic approach because it had failed him. A friend of mine worked in my group when he was developing that paper and I think I really have the right to say this about him and his work. I wish you'd say a sentence or two more. What was the critical point to which he thought he'd fail? Well, just read his last book on vehicles. I mean, this is a desperate attempt to save the situation, but it doesn't succeed. To save what situation? To save something that is as close as he can get to a realistic approach, but he doesn't succeed. I'm not dead yet, but I'm hoping to make it. He was a very smart guy, too, and he tried very hard. It's been 80 years that these QMs are kicking around. It's about time we got pushed to a lower level and something else to go beyond it. My feeling about that is that something along the lines of either town is the same theory.

57:30 That's what you're asking for.

1:00:00 I don't see how, I don't see logically how you can possibly get from there to where what I could do. I don't call it quantum physics. I don't call it quantum physics. It really kills quantum mechanics according to the direct. But I have the right to even say that. What I'd really like is to get... Well, I was just... By the way, do you even know about Neumann's anti... No, no, there isn't. ...so-called collapse of the wing? He's right up front about it if you read what he said and accept it. Yeah, and I agree with what both did and we made relativistic.