Adventures of a Realist

The experimental foundation for some of fundamental physics is riddled with

“loopholes”, but does the community want to know?

Caroline H Thompson

31:12:05

Preface

After about twelve years now of continuous effort, on the face of it there is little evidence of

progress. I have been playing David to a Goliath who has increased in stature by the day, the

falsehoods I am fighting being repeated so often now in the scientific as well as popular literature

that they scarcely raise an eyebrow. How many people stop to think when the standard phrases are

trotted out about quantum entanglement of separated particles that are able to influence each other

instantaneously at a distance? How many people stop to wonder if it is really true that we can no

longer trust our intuition – that the ultimate theories of physics are bound to be “counterintuitive” so

that it is pointless for us mere mortals to hope to understand them? The “modern physics”

establishment seems to have succeeded in imposing its collective delusions (built up over the past

100 years) on the rest of us. We have been, intentionally or otherwise, brainwashed.

And yet there is hope. This David has, despite quite a battle, managed to achieve some influence

on the internet. I may even have influenced, via my correspondence with the authors, a few

physicists into changing their lines of research or modifying their claims. There are disturbing

signs, though, that the remainder of the battle is going to be long-drawn-out and messy. People are

trying to twist logic so at keep a foot in both camps, persuading themselves that even though the

experiments “infringe Bell’s inequality” this, by one argument or another, does not mean that

anything impossible is going on. Such arguments do not help the “realist” cause. The truth of the

matter is quite simple, demanding nothing more than ordinary logic and common sense: the

experiments have been misinterpreted, using invalid versions of Bell’s tests.

The net effect is that publication of this book clearly cannot wait (as I once thought) until my battle

has been won. Perhaps the book itself will prove a useful weapon. I’m hoping that by its means I

shall be able to arm people who were previously only onlookers. There is no reason why any

ordinary mortal, given a basic schooling and a little time and perseverance, should not understand at

least my “Chaotic Ball” model and why the most commonly-used “Bell test” is worthless.

So I must this time – I’ve started about four times before – finish the book. If I leave it any longer

the frustration may finally drive me round the bend, or I may reach the end of my days (there have

been warning signs: I’ve just had to undergo a second course of chemotherapy for cancer) with the

truth locked in my computer files and the archives of obscure internet news groups.

I will had some effect, but few are likely to recognise this. Some of the many physicists with whom

I have corresponded my refrain from publishing yet more in support of the quantum entanglement

myth. A certain test may no longer be conducted in a certain manner. But there will be no Nobel

Prizes for the woman who finally nailed the coffin on the myth! If it does die, the credit will go to,

say, the banks, who are currently developing “quantum encryption”, when they discover that what

they are really doing has nothing to do with quantum magic. Or it might go to some disillusioned

scientist working for a computer manufacturer who has invested millions in “quantum computing”,

when he discovers that the little bit of quantum magic that was suppose to make it faster than

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current supercomputers just doesn’t work. It will be someone with at least a PhD in physics –

someone who has been part of the establishment, attending the right conferences and with a few

heavy articles in Physical Review Letters to his name.

The book is not only about the Bell tests, by the way. Their study has led me to look at lot of the

rest of modern physics, uncovering, along the way, other equally murky areas where the text books

seem somewhat economical with the truth, and to develop my own alternative view of the way the

universe ticks. These are just my private views – a set of ideas that has seemed to me to be fruitful,

enabling me to feel at one with the universe – and they are quite separate from my work on the Bell

tests. I have not tried to push them onto the physics community at large, only mentioning them to

small specialized groups who are already thinking along similar lines. Anyway, the main story is

interspersed with these speculations, introduced as they occurred to me. Readers interested only in

the Bell test could perhaps skip them, and, indeed, all my “adventures”, and move straight on to the

appendices – a selection of my scientific papers, published on the internet if nowhere else.

Though I grumble at the frustration, let me assure you that I have had a highly rewarding adventure.

It has not yet destroyed me.

CHT, 31:12:05

Caroline H Thompson

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1. Introduction

How an innocent statistician was transformed into a “dissident”

“It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”

William Shakespeare [from Ben Best]

Once upon a time, I belonged to the ordinary world in which you could, roughly speaking, assume

that people were rational. If it rains, you take an umbrella; if you work you get paid; if a scientist

tells you something, it is the truth! All that seems a long time ago now. There are a few things that

can be treated rationally: I have an umbrella and can use it when I need to but (more fool me, I hear

you say) it is possible to work oneself to the bone for zero pay and (more to the point for my

present purposes) there is, for scientists as well as others, a conflict in practice between working for

pay and always telling the truth. It can become a matter of telling what you’ve been told, or what

you think others want to hear, or what your experiment does show but not quite under the

conditions it was supposed to. This is not quite the same thing.

My training as a statistician should have put me on my guard. At East Malling Research Station,

near Maidstone, Kent, they do experiments on fruit crops. They have changed their name now and

broadened their scope but I do not suppose the system has changed. I was in the Statistics Section,

but had special responsibilities for the Pomology and Fruit Storage Sections. Every single

experiment had to be both designed and analysed by me. Why? Well, partly this was because it

was in the old days, in the transition period when computer packages were only just coming into

use, so the experimenter needed the help, but also it was a matter of “policing”. If experimenters

are left to their own devices, they may well find out many truths but they will inevitably bias the

presentation of their results. They will be selective. We wanted to be able to trust the “standard

error” figure that was published in the report. We statisticians, it was presumed, would be using

only rational criteria, while the experimenters would be influenced by their beliefs. (I was not a

very good statistician, by the way: I often thought the beliefs more interesting than the data!)

Believe it or not, I reached the advanced age of about 33 still more-or-less convinced in the

rationality of the world. Then came the first shock: when I stopped work to start a family I could

not get re-employed. We had made this more difficult by moving to a remote region of Wales, and

had aggravated the situation yet further by making a big mistake. We had accepted a plot of land as

a gift from my father, and it had some planning restrictions attached to it. This is a period of my

life that I prefer not to talk about. It taught me about working for nothing – my husband and I

started a small business which never did produce any income – and it taught me that the real world

of human beings is not rational. If it had been, the planning restrictions would have been lifted and

we might have escaped from our trap rather sooner.

I still thought the world of physics was rational, though! As a distraction from my business

problems I had read some of Isaac Asimov’s books – not his science fiction but his serious science

essays, such as “The Left Hand of the Electron”. Here I could relax in the secure knowledge that

cause would be followed by effect.

Asimov did not write about modern fundamental physics, though. He did not warn me about

“nonlocality”! Long ago, doing mathematics at university in 1965, I had had a brief introduction to

quantum theory, and had thought that this was such a basically bad idea, with its various

“conceptual difficulties” and denial that any deeper understanding was possible, that I did not

expect it to survive. But here I was, in 1992, approaching age 50, reading that quantum theory had

predicted an effect that depended on something here affecting something over there

instantaneously, with no time for the transmission of any force or signal, and that experiments had

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confirmed this! I read in a book review in New Scientist about Alain Aspect’s experiments1 in

Paris in 1981-2, and was shocked.

By this time our business had collapsed and I was unemployed, trying to re-educate myself at the

University of Wales, Aberystwyth. I was doing a one-year Computer Science M Sc course and,

having extended the period for a few months in order to complete my thesis, towards the end had

some free time and mental energy. I decided to investigate. As this book tells, it was the start of an

adventure.

I found out some facts. Nobody has ever seriously challenged the veracity of these facts, yet the

world is still being told that those experiments proved that the quantum world obeys weird rules,

different from the every day ones.

I have had discussions with experimenters – at times it has looked as if they welcomed my ideas –

talked at conferences, corresponded with editors and reviewers of the mainstream journals, and I

doubt if anyone has ever considered me to be anything other than rational. Yet now I find that I am

a “dissident” and my web site has drifted into being – as am informed from time to time – a “handy

guide to the lunatic fringe”.

Why? And are those in the fringe in fact more “lunatic” than those in established posts? Both

within and outside the establishment, is there not a very good excuse for insanity? I believe that,

for a person with a rational mind, to be taught some of the illogicalities of modern physics as if they

were established truths is enough to cause lunacy! For (as, again, I had suspected back in my

undergraduate days) Einstein’s relativity theories are not logical either. Claims of support from

experimental evidence are as hollow here as in the branch of quantum theory in which I

accidentally found myself involved. Modern technology has proceeded in spite of, rather than

thanks to, the acclaimed “twin pillars of modern physics”.

My adventure is still going on. Since I keep moving the goal posts, it is unlikely ever to end. It has

been fun, frustrating and at the same time hugely rewarding, but not financially. Curiously, the

aspects of my life that might seem the least satisfactory have worked most to my advantage: I am

(so far as my physics is concerned) totally on my own, and I have no paid employment. How

many other physicists have such freedom?

A little more of my personal background is given in Appendix A, but let us proceed with more

interesting matters: the scandal (Bryan Wallace called it a “farce”2

) that is modern physics.

1 Aspect, A et al., Physical Review Letters 47, 460 (1981); 49, 91 (1982) and 49, 1804 (1982)

2 Wallace, Bryan, The Farce of Physics. (1993) Available electronically at

http://surf.de.uu.net/bookland/sci/farce/farce_toc.html

Caroline H Thompson

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2. The Discovery

How I rediscovered the main Bell test loophole

“What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a

man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to

him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have

walked ...” Mark Twain [from Ben Best]

In the summer of the year 2000 I attended a conference in Storrs, Connecticut, organized by the

Natural Philosophy Alliance. The opening words of my presentation were: “I am going to talk

about something that does not happen, so if you don’t at present know anything about it, in my

opinion you never need to. It is of no scientific value!”, or words to that effect. I enjoyed giving

that talk. It was very informal, punctuated by an hiatus when the projector screen decided of its

own accord to do tricks behind my back. It was about the sixth I had given, spread over the

previous few years, all on the same subject, so I was pretty confident of my material and had only

the tiniest vestige of the feeling of terror with which I had approached my first. My reception was

enthusiastic – but then, this was a friendly audience, already well versed in rebellious ideas (mainly

about “relativity”) and mostly with their own axes to grind, unrelated to my subject, and no toes

sticking out to be trodden on ...

But I meant to start at the beginning. I mention Storrs only so as to reassure you that you do not

need to know anything, ever about “Bell tests”, though I expect that by the time you’ve read this

book you will feel quite familiar with them. I shall tell you a little as I go along, but if you want to

know more at the outset you might like to start by reading my paper based on that conference talk,

Appendix B, or one of the books by Franco Selleri (they delve deeply into the subject) or the more

popular ones by Jim Baggott, Alastair Rae or Euan Squires. Though I recommend these, it is not

without reservation. Nobody gets the story entirely right. The best way to learn the subject is the

way I did, through reading published papers and following references, but this demands a high

degree of luck! I was extraordinarily lucky not to find myself on a false, sterile, trail.

When I first met the tests I would not even have considered myself to be a physicist – I shall never

be the kind who can pass a physics exam! (I did pass ‘A’ level at school, but that’s another matter.)

I had been blissfully unaware of the quantum world in a career that had, after a potentially

academic start – a degree in maths at Cambridge – been very much geared to practical matters. If I

keep roughly to chronological order, hopefully you will be able to retrace my steps, learning a

rather different version of physics from the one in the text books. The “establishment”, of course,

may well feel that I am leading you in entirely the wrong direction! “What’s all this?” they ask.

“How can you reject all this experimental evidence? How can you reject both quantum theory and

Einstein’s relativity – and, incidentally, the Big Bang?”. But I can. I don’t throw out everything, of

course, but this is where my trail has led me and I am by no means on my own.

Moreover, I can at least make a start at describing how things “really work”, and my conscience is

not nagging me too badly over the fact that I do very little maths. Part of the problem with 20th

century fundamental physics has been a philosophical one – the decision to accept theories that

gave the right answers and not bother too much about understanding. This is all right for practical

work but causes a sense of indignation in the rest of us, who do not expect ever to “use” our

physics. We are in the game purely for intellectual satisfaction.

But I digress. The purpose of this book is to publicise facts that are known to specialists but not to

the public at large. There is nothing controversial about that, is there? There are no trade secrets in

pure science!

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One set of facts – the one that inspired this book – concerns the Bell tests. As I said, knowing about

these will not in itself do anything to improve your understanding of physics, but nonetheless, if

you are to make head or tail of my story, they have to be faced! What are Bell tests? Well, they

are related to a little problem with the logic of quantum theory that Einstein and his colleagues

Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) did not like and on which they wrote a paper3 back in 1935. (I am not

recommending that you read it! Later, maybe.) The logic implied that two “quantum particles” that

had once interacted remained locked together in a peculiar, “non-local” way that could not happen

to ordinary “macroscopic” ones. They remained “correlated” in a special way, something more

than just the fact that they might have exactly opposite momenta or exactly parallel “spins”.

I still do not pretend to understand the quantum theory involved, but then, as many of the great and

famous have said, nobody does. The tests, though, are based on what happens if you use “classical”

ideas and ordinary logic – correlations based on shared properties and nothing more – and this I do

understand. Quantum theory is not used in the derivation of the Bell test limit, only in its

application, predicting that the limit will be exceeded. Straightforward enough? (Yes, maybe, if it

weren’t for the obvious question: “Why do we need to test this as EPR had shown in 1935 that the

quantum theory prediction was absurd?” That is yet another story, though.)

Fig 1: The scheme behind the basic Bell test (from Aspect’s first 1982 paper1

)

Pairs of “photons” are produced at S. Detectors (polarisation analysers, PA, PB) categorise

them as ‘+’ or ‘–’. The number of ++ or – – results (the like coincidences) is compared to

the number of +– or –+ ones (the unlike coincidences). The difference, divided in practice

by the total number of pairs counted, is used as a measure of the correlation between the

particles. For the standard Bell test, the experiment has to be repeated four times, using

selected settings for the detectors. If the detectors are set parallel to each other, in ideal

conditions the correlation should be “perfect” (the value exactly +1 or –1), but for the Bell

test they are at various different angles.

Anyway, Bell tests entered my life back in 1992, and revolutionised it. It was an innocent-enough

article – only a book review – yet it was my first encounter with “nonlocality”. I realised with

amazement that quantum theory was still going strong and that the world of physics had become

crazier than ever! (Yes, it can be called “crazy”! The word was used in the title of an article by two

very respected physicists in Physics World in 19954

.) I had been taking the New Scientist regularly

for the sake of the job advertisements, vaguely hoping that the one suitable research station in my

area might some day need a statistician. I came across a review by Trevor Marshall and Max

3 Einstein, A, B Podolsky and N Rosen: “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered

Complete”, Physical Review 47, 777-780 (1935)

4 Greenberger, Daniel and Anton Zeilinger, “Quantum theory: still crazy after all these years”, Physics World, 33-38,

September 1995

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 7

Wallis – I think it was of Jim Baggott’s book on quantum theory5

, which, by the way, is quite a

reasonable starting point for beginners. The review said something about experiments seeming to

have confirmed “nonlocal” effects.

What was the world coming to? “Nonlocal” means, to me, the same as “by magic” or, in other

words, impossible and evidently the result of some trick or sleight of hand. This could not be

physics! Physics is concerned with investigating the causes of things, and the causes it considers

are real things – the effects of moving solid objects, electromagnetic waves, sound waves – all real

things that take a certain amount of time to travel from A to B. “Nonlocal” means something at A

affecting something at B with no intervening time interval at all. Impossible!

The instant I read that review, I was sure I could find some logical (“local realist”) explanation for

the observations if only I could find out the experimental facts! It seemed just so obvious that only

a madman could believe in nonlocality, so the chances were that no really sane person had ever

seriously tried to find a better explanation! (I discovered later that a few relatively sane people,

including Trevor Marshall, had found “local realist” explanations but had been ignored.)

So I kept my eyes open for more clues. I had no money to buy the book (I managed to borrow it a

few years later). I did not know where to find the original papers. Horst Holstein, however, my

director of studies on my Computer Science course, had a very interesting book on his shelf:

Hendrik Lorentz’ “Problems of Modern Physics”, published in 19276

. Might this, predating the

EPR paper by eight years, tell me why physics had gone so badly wrong? I think it was my

attempts at making head or tail of Lorentz’ book that prompted me to “read physics” over a wide

front. It seemed that the problems of 1927 had mostly been papered over, not solved, and so I read

and read – everything I could lay my hands on (which, with access to the university library, was

quite a lot!) – determined to find out what had been going on, how it had come about that our

technology had advanced so far and yet our theories were so clearly ripe for improvement.

It was about a year before I returned to the “EPR paradox”, when a second book review (September

4, 1993?) stimulated some letters, prompting the New Scientist to publish a newsletter (Baggott,

November 1993) that included both a proof of Bell’s theorem and a few references to Aspect’s

papers. I was just finishing my M Sc dissertation for my Computer Science course at Aberystwyth

– I’d been playing with artificial neural networks and found this very exciting. My brain was in

good working order! I studied that proof, and was suspicious. It was all right as far as it went but I

found it hard to believe the test was any use in the real world. I went up to the library and looked

up one of Aspect’s papers. My ticket had just run out so I could not take it home. I thought about

it, though. There had been many technical terms yet I thought I could see what was being done,

and, after a few days of pondering, it came to me!

I’ll describe things the way I saw them at the time. It may be easier to understand them by means

of the analogy that I invented later – my “Chaotic Ball” – so you may prefer to skip the indented

paragraphs in the following and look instead at Appendix B or one of my other papers7

. Or you

5 Baggott, Jim, “The Meaning of Quantum Theory”, Oxford University Press, 1992

6 Lorentz, H A, “Problems of Modern Physics”, Dover 1927

7 Thompson, C H. "The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments", Foundations of Physics Letters 9,

357 (1996), http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037; C H Thompson and Horst Holstein, “The ‘Chaotic Ball’ model,

local realism and the Bell test loopholes”, http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0210150 (pdf version) or

http://users.aber.ac.uk/cat/Papers/chaotic2_twocol.doc, submitted to American Journal of Physics October 2002.

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may, as I said at the outset, choose to bypass the EPR paradox entirely: it is something that does not

happen and there are plenty of other things, much more deserving of attention, that do. Besides, it

must be remembered that the ball analogy was invented to solve the thought-experiment in the

popular books, not the real experiment of Fig. 1. Though it seems obvious to me that the same

principle solves both, it is possible that my mathematical intuition is stronger than average. The

message I want to get across is that there are matters of straightfoward geometry and algebra

that ought at the very least to have been openly discussed – and discussed outside the narrow

confines of the quantum physics community -- before anyone lept to the conclusion that the

impossible really did happen.

To continue the story:

At some very early point in this episode, I had read a chapter from one of Alastair Rae’s

books on quantum mechanics8

. The one referenced in that New Scientist newsletter9 had

not been in the library, but I’d found this instead and it was just (I thought) what I needed.

It included a different proof, of a slightly different “Bell test”, and this made a little more

sense. It also included a diagram. (Diagrams are not common in quantum theory books:

most of the concepts cannot be visualised – a great handicap to understanding.) What we

are trying to imagine is a pair of particles, A and B, that have exactly opposite “spin”. If

A’s spin is represented by a point on the surface of a sphere, then B’s is represented by the

point exactly opposite.

It is a pity that the spins are “opposite” as this makes diagrams more difficult, but,

nevertheless, I think I must credit Rae with the basic idea. (A year or two later I met him.

I’d moved on to different hypotheses by then, though, and do not remember discussing this.)

I made a couple of small modifications to his diagram. Firstly, I realised that the

mathematics is essentially the same if we assume the spins identical. The clue to this is in

the caption to Fig.1: The formula usually assumed as a definition of correlation can be

written:

.

.

++ −− +− −+

++ −− +− −+

+ + +

+ − − = N N N N

N N N N E

Reverse the roles of the ‘+’ and ‘–’ suffices and you reverse the sign of the correlation but

not the numerical value. If we do this, it easier to see what is going on: our two points

merge, so that we now have just one to deal with.

So now we are considering just one point on the surface of a sphere. What will an

instrument designed to measure spin actually do? It can only give one of two possible

answers — ‘up’ or ‘down’, or ‘+’ or ‘–’ in my current notation — so presumably it will

effectively divide the sphere into two hemispheres. A spin will be registered ‘+’ if

represented by a point in one, ‘–’ in the otherr. The position of the dividing circle depends

on the orientation of the detecting device — its setting. If particles A and B are measured

by instruments with different settings, each will correspond to a different dividing circle.

8 Rae, Alistair, “Quantum Mechanics”, McGraw-Hill, 1981

9 Rae, Alastair, “Quantum Physics: illusion or reality?”, Cambridge University Press, 1986

Caroline H Thompson

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Fig 2: Spin in my “identical spin” version of an idealized EPR experiment. The

diagram comes from my Chaotic Ball paper, in which ‘up’ and ‘down’ are replaced

by ‘N’ and ‘S’. The sphere of possible spin directions is divided into four sections,

labelled NN, SS, NS and SN, by two circles, DA and DB. The positions of the circles

depend on the orientations of the detectors. The small arrows point towards the ‘N’

hemispheres.

Our model is deterministic: the spins are “hidden variables” that completely determine the

results we are interested in – the numbers of occasions on which we measure two plusses

(NN in thd notation of the diagram), two minuses (SS) or a plus and a minus (NS or SN).

If the actual spin direction was completely random, the expected numbers in each category

will correspond straightforwardly to areas between the circles.

So much for the basic logic. I thought next, though, about how any real detector would

work. It is required to categorise all results into ‘+’ or ‘–’, and all the information it is given

for any one particle is that it has spin in a particular direction. So the chances are it will be

able to make this decision much more reliably if that spin is in the “right” direction – the

one in which the detector is set. The further away it is from this direction, the less reliably

will it be “correctly” categorised. I wondered what would happen if the instrument was

unable to come to a decision at all when the spin was near to one of those dividing lines ...

Eureka!

It was all a matter of “missing bands”!

I drew myself a picture of a ball with two ribbons tied round it – pretty ribbons, in my imagination,

as I was influenced by the decorated “Christingle” oranges that my children had carried in one of

those little ceremonies that children are apt to become involved in. The ribbons were the points that

would be missed; the bits in between were the ones that would be recorded, and their proportions

would change as you varied the widths of the ribbons! And the Bell test would be affected. A

“genuine” test would remain valid, but not all were genuine. Some of the ones use in practice could

be “violated”. The missing bands would appear to make the impossible – the nonlocal effect –

happen.

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Fig 3: Ball with missing bands: the key to the “detection loophole” in EPR

experiments. Except in the special cases in which the bands are exactly at right angles

or on top of each other, the ratios between the four shaded areas vary as you vary

their width. This alters the test! (The implication behind quantum theory

assumptions is that when some values are not detected they are spread evenly all over

the sphere, not in bands.)

I announced my result to my unfortunate pupil, whom I was supposed to be coaching in elementary

maths. I announced it to my family. They, I assume, thought I’d gone mad – or perhaps they

thought this had happened years ago! When I went in to the university next day, I told the

unsuspecting group in the coffee lounge ... but I also went back to the library to check my facts.

I had a niggling suspicion that the test used in that paper was not the one in the New Scientist

newsletter, or the one in Rae’s book, and hence that my explanation was not relevant. And I was

right. The test was different – in fact, the whole setup was different. All the discussions I’d seen

so far had involved detectors that could produce results ‘+’ or ‘–’ (N or S in the notation of the

diagrams), along the lines of Fig. 1. This diagram applies, as I came to realise, to only one out of

Aspect’s three experiments, and it was not the one I happened to have looked at! I had looked at

Aspect’s second 1982 paper, his famous one in detector settings were switched during the flight of

the photons, and in this, as it happened, each detectors had only one output channel. It could only

produce ‘+’ or nothing.

I started to look up other references, but time was at a premium. I had just finished my course and

so officially had no rights at the university. I looked up Aspect’s other papers in his Bell test set

and discovered the one that did use “two-channel” detectors and a test more like the one I’d met. I

felt my idea was really very likely to be the key to at least this one experiment (why hadn’t I seen

anyone else mention it, as it was really quite easy?), so I wrote a short report and posted it to my

Head of Section (Frank Bott) and to the Head of Physics.

The report was vital if I wanted to carry on – and I did! This was the most exciting thing that had

ever happened to me. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, to find out how on earth people had

managed to interpret these perfectly ordinary, mundane, experimental results as showing

nonlocality. I was not seriously worried about that other “single-channel” test, the one my “eureka”

experience had not really applied to. Simple “missing bands” didn’t explain it but there were clues

to other possibilities buried somewhere in the experimental details. It could be only a matter of

time before I unearthed them.

I was frustrated, though! It was Christmas. Both heads of section had gone home. The library was

shut. I distracted myself by reading the whole of Asimov’s Science – a present from me to my son

– and trying to persuade my primitive computer at home to create an “autostereograph” – one of

those pictures that you can see in 3-D if you trick your eyes into focussing differently from usual.

The instant the university was back in business, I was up the library again. But I had no ticket! I

desperately needed copies of some of the papers to read at home. I have to confess here that I

sinned. The journals were not yet bound. They were thin. I tucked a couple in with my other

papers, took them to a copier and got them back unnoticed. Not that anyone would ever have

missed them! I doubt if those volumes had been opened by anyone else for years.

Fortunately when Frank returned he listened kindly, influenced, I expect, by my good friend Horst.

He agreed to help me by getting me rights to the library and to continued use of the university

computer, and also said I could use the university address for correspondence. It turned out that the

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 11

Head of Physics at the time was only “acting head” and did not feel competent to judge my work or

to support me.

[At the end of 2003, thanks indirectly to the actions of an enemy (the full story comes in Ch. #), I

lost my invaluable arrangement with the Computer Science Department. Without it I doubt if I

would have achieved anything. The university address added weight to my letters. The university

computer, with its recognised academic address, enabled me to put papers in the quantum physics

archive at Los Alamos, and to submit them to the official journals. (Fortunately, I have been able to

hang onto my rights for the archive, and, though unusual, it is not impossible to submit to journals

from a private address.) And the library is where I educated myself. Fortunately now it is to a

large extent replaced by the internet.]

To continue: My first idea – my eureka moment – had in fact been a rediscovery of the “detection

loophole”, which is the best known, though what is by no means so well known is that it applies

only to certain Bell tests, primarily ones intended for use with “two-channel” detectors. (In fact, it is

not well known that more than one “Bell test” even exists, let alone that they are not equivalent,

each involving different assumptions.)

Within a few weeks, going through the paper with a tooth-comb and scribbling endless diagrams, I

had worked out what I thought was the most likely explanation for the experiment I had looked at

first – the one with only “single-channel” detectors, only able to register ‘+’ or nothing. I thought it

could be a matter of timing – a “timing loophole”. But that’s another story – one that was later the

cause of one of my shouting matches with Trevor Marshall. It was a logical possibility, and I found

that a few others had had the same idea, but in real situations, as I discovered a few years later, it

was dominated in Aspect’s experiment by other artifacts. The idea had made me think, though. It

had led me to challenge not only the idea of the photon (which I had discounted from the very start)

but also the accepted theory of the “atomic cascade” – the mechanism that he had used for the

production of pairs of photons. My voyage of discovery had only just begun.

Adventures of a Realist

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3. A Revelation about Gravity, and First Approaches to the Community

Completing (?) the solution to the EPR paradox, a cold planning meeting,

and Roger Penrose

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us

is whether it is crazy enough ....” Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli [W H

Cropper, “The Quantum Physicists”, p57 (Oxford, New York, 1970)]

So the Christmas of discovery was over and I was “high”! No, I wasn’t on drugs, but I was way up

in the clouds. I’d survived dreadful traumas – problems over my use of the computer, delays over

obtaining a new library ticket. In the state I was in, these seemed matters of life or death! I felt I’d

near-enough explained Aspect’s three experiments and that the world ought to be told. And

IMMEDIATELY! Why should they be misled an instant longer, not only on the matter of

nonlocality but also on the whole justification for the “photon” concept?

My researches into possible explanations for those stubborn “single-channel” Bell tests of Aspect’s

had led me into some real physics, much more interesting than the geometry and logic involved in

my ball model. I was beginning to have my own ideas on the nature of light and matter. A possible

key to the experiments was the exact time of detection of the light. If weaker light, weakened by

passage through a polariser at any angle other than that for which it was set, were detected on

average just a little bit later than stronger light, this could cause bias in the Bell test.

I was assuming that where Aspect talked of “photons” he was in fact dealing with pulses of

light whose duration was up to about 20 ns. Two strong light pulses, each having started

with polarisation parallel to the axis of their polariser, would both tend to be detected

relatively early and hence within the “coincidence time window” of 17 ns or whatever. A

strong pulse paired with a weak one was less likely to arrive within the same window. Two

weak ones would both tend to be detected late and so had, again, a slightly higher chance of

arrival in the same window. Thus the chance of coincidence when the polarisers are nearly

parallel is biased upwards, that when they are nearly orthogonal biased downwards. The net

effect would be to increase the Bell test statistic.

Whether this effect could cause enough bias to account for the observations was another matter, but

it was a logical possibility.

I’d looked up facts about the polarisation of light10, for the real experiments used this, not

the spin of any actual “particles”. (Quantum theorists assume that light is made of

“photons” – “particles” but with no mass – and that somehow polarization is equivalent to

spin. I have never seen any convincing evidence for the existence of these creatures, hence

the inverted commas. If I drop them in future, this doesn’t mean I’ve started believing in

them, only that I find all this punctuation irksome.) I’d looked up facts on particle

detection, including the “photomultipliers” used to detect photons11. I’d read a little on

quantum theory from text books such as French and Taylor12, discovered (and rejected

almost out of hand!) Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics as presented in his very

10 Shurcliff, W A and S S Ballard, "Polarized Light", Van Nostrand 1964

11 Kleinknecht, Konrad, “Detectors for Particle Radiation}, Cambridge University Press, 1986

12 French, A P and E F Taylor, “An Introduction to Quantum Physics”, Thomas Nelson, 1978

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 13

readable book for layman, QED13, and come across a few bits of modern dogma, such as the

belief that the intensity of the light made no difference to the time of detection.

Now one of the reasons people started to believe in photons was the “photoelectric effect”,

which is supposed to show the absorption of individual photons by atoms and ejection of

electrons. It is a key part of the dogma that all photons of a given frequency are identical, so

it follows that time taken for each event can’t vary in any systematic way. In particular, it

can’t vary with the rate at which the photons are arriving, the quantum theory equivalent of

the beam intensity. I found that the main experimental support for this dated from way back

in 1928, with the work of Lawrence and Beams14, and wondered what kind of accuracy they

would have had in those days. It seemed that they had narrowed the times down to about 2

nanoseconds15.

But what would have happened if they’d used Aspect’s source? My interpretation of what it

produced had nothing to do with photons! I got the impression that he would have been

producing short pulses of light, rather longer than 2 ns — nearer 20. As I said earlier, I

thought it possible that he was in fact tending to detect stronger pulses earlier than weak

ones. Under the classical ideas of light that I had been reading in Shurcliff and Ballard, the

effect of a polariser would be to reduce the intensity of each individual pulse of light, not, as

quantum theory said, the probability of a photon being transmitted. It would have little

effect on those polarised in the direction for which it was set, would block completely those

polarised at right angles to this, but would merely reduce the intensity of those at

intermediate angles. This could affect the time of detection and bias his results, producing

Bell test violations in those more interesting cases, the experiments with just single-channel

detectors that could not be explained by my “missing band” theory. (Or perhaps this is

written with a pinch of hindsight! It was a graph in his Ph D thesis that I did not see till

1995 that confirmed my ideas about pulse lengths. You could interpret them the quantum

theory way, as showing the probabilities of emission at particular intervals, but I felt it much

more likely that it was more a matter of probability of detection. The ambiguity is not a

new problem! It is essentially the same problem that Lawrence and Beams were discussing

in the conclusion of their 1928 paper!)

To say that Aspect’s exeriments were in conflict with the laws of local realism seemed ridiculous.

Even if my ideas turned out to be wrong, similar explanations were bound to exist. I’d only spent a

few weeks and had only seen the rather cryptic reports, so there could be other artifacts that I hadn’t

thought of yet, but this felt like real achievement! This was all my own work, something that

swelled my ego and at the same time instilled in me a sense of vocation, an obligation to pass on

my knowledge. Who could I tell?

13 Feynman, Richard P, “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, Princeton University Press 1985.

14 Lawrence, E O and J W Beams, “The element of time in the photoelectric effect”, Physical Review 32, 1928.

15 I have now (2003) read the original Lawrence and Beams paper. They had tried to measure the shortest time from

arrival of the light to registering of a detection. Yes, some detections did seem to occur instantaneoulsy (or even, until

they had sorted the problem, before the pulse was officially supposed to have started!) but that does not mean that the

average time to detection did not vary with light intensity. If our instrument is only able to register one event then

requires a recovery time, it is reasonable, in my view, to expect the average time to this detection to be greater the

weaker the pulse is. Lawrence and Beams did not, incidentally, even try and look at “single photons”. They dealt with

short flashes of light, only mentioning the dreaded “light quantum” in the theoretical discussion at the end of the paper.

They did not even attempt to compare weak and strong light. Nothing in their observations conflicted with my

hypothesis that, given pulses of light lasting up to 20 ns, the strongest might have tended to be detected a few

nanoseconds ealier than the weakest, the very weakest, of course, usually not being detected at all.

Adventures of a Realist

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Then this stream of thought was suddenly diverted. I was standing in the freezing cold, supposed to

be listening to a representative of the local Planning Authority discussing the pros and cons of

building a new housing estate in the field just above our own. I wished I was sitting somewhere

warm and comfortable! I didn’t want to see the field built up, but at the same time I guessed that

the owners were in financial trouble and so needed the money. (They did, and as they were builders

by trade this would have made all the difference. Soon after this episode they went bankrupt.)

Having just been through a similar situation myself with our own confrontation with the authorities

and the failure of our business, I was sympathetic but depressed and confused. There was a biting

cold wind and I was tired. My attention drifted.

I had a “revelation”! I knew what gravity was! It was not a special force all on its own, still less a

warping of space-time. It was simply the difference between attractive and repulsive magnetic

forces, or, if not exactly that, then something very closely related to it. (Now that is definitely

hindsight! My diary tells another story ... Hmmm ... Not bad, not bad at all – it was a natural

extension of ideas about light and magnetism that I’d been quietly mulling over for years, ever

since the days of our transport business and my reading of Asimov’s books ...) The force pulling

me down felt somehow different! I sensed how it was related to the rest of the universe. There

were waves coming in from the depths of space as well as up from the Earth. I felt more at one

with the whole universe at that instant than any other in my life. In fact, the experience was so

profound that, a few days later, an ominous inner voice was telling me that I was intruding into

realms not meant for human kind!

Ah well, such is human nature! I put my ideas on EPR experiments on the back burner and

switched all my attention to gravity, the structure of matter and the nature of radiation. Browsing

through those musty tomes in the library – the bound collections of ancient journals – I soon found

that I was not the only person to link gravity to magnetism, but got the impression that the idea had

gone out of fashion. Papers on it had been written in the 1930’s or so, but then had come the era of

Misner, Thorne and Wheeler16 (which I’d dipped into a couple of years earlier, following another

“revelation” I’d had when I’d suddenly understood how to visualise 4-dimensional space using a

“neural network”!), and Einstein’s General Relativity had become firmly entrenched. Anyway, for

a few weeks I neglected EPR, and had quite a struggle getting back to it later to fulfil my

“vocation”. My new vision of the universe resulted in another report, boldly stating that I had

solved all the mysteries of physics – indeed, of the Universe!

That was the problem! My EPR work was all solid fact (well, almost) but the excitement had

evidently gone to my head, and it was unfortunate that it was at this moment in time that I had my

first opportunity to publicise my ideas. Roger Penrose (whose book, The Emperor’s New Mind17, I

hastily borrowed from my father) was due to give a set of three public lectures in Aberystwyth that

March, a mere two weeks after my revelation in the freezing farmyard. He had been invited by the

Physics Department. I was determined that he should not leave without knowing of my discovery!

He already knew a little about the EPR paradox. He would surely understand and help me set the

community straight?

I approached the Physics Department again. I was slightly mystified by my reception (by the acting

head, as there was still no permanent one). No, he was not prepared to be my errand boy! I would

have to find my own way of getting my draft papers to him. Which I did. I found out where he

would be staying and went down personally to leave copies at the hotel. I wrote a note saying I

hoped to meet him over coffee. (This was in the Maths Department coffee lounge, with the

collaboration of a statistician, Roger Owen, who was by then taking a little notice of my ideas.)

16 Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, “Gravitation”, W H Freeman, 1973

17 Penrose, Roger, “The Emperor's New Mind”, Oxford University Press, 1989

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 15

And so came about my meeting with a famous man, renowned as mathematician, physicist and

philosopher, but, Oh Dear, I did not stick to my subject! I spent half a minute talking about my

EPR papers then got started on gravity, drawing him little diagrams with primitive “Bohr atoms”

and forces that varied with the motion of the electrons. Maybe if it hadn’t been for this my

attempts at capitalising on the “old boy network” (we’d both been to Cambridge) might have met

with more success. He did seem to be sympathetic – not that I gave him much opportunity to say

anything! He did say “Yes” when I asked if he could help me to get things published. He never

replied to my letters, though. I sent him updated versions of my papers but nothing came back.

For the next few weeks, or maybe months, I lived in hope, meantime returning to my studies on

gravity and everything else that caught my fancy. My diary shows evidence of self-education at a

phenomenal pace, and reminds me that I was at the same time making some effort to earn a living: I

was doing some programming work for the library. A year later there was an episode that might

have been related to that conversation with Penrose. There was an article in Physics World by

Colin Jack18. I fancied that the mad woman scientist who features at the end of it might have been

myself. Jack and Penrose were both at Oxford at the time ...

18 Jack, Colin, “Sherlock Holmes investigates the EPR paradox”, Physics World, 39-42, April 1995

Adventures of a Realist

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4. Victory already?

John Gribbin, and a return to EPR research

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good,

you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” Howard Aiken [from Ben

Best]

1994 was a year of hard work. So was 1995, and 1996 and every year right up to the present,

though maybe I’m taking things just a little easier now! In 1994 my husband, John, was driving the

buses. This did not provide enough for us to live on so we received “Family Credit”. I could not

have afforded to get into Aberystwyth, about eighteen miles away, if I had not had a free pass in my

capacity as a driver’s wife. Almost every day I took the bus in to town, walked up the hill to the

university, and worked at my self-appointed task. (The little job for the library had been completed

after a few months and was not repeated. It had been fun to do but was a disappointment in the end.

I doubt if the program was ever used.) Every day I typed up notes from the previous night in my

diary or bibliography, then climbed the four flights up to the library, looked up more papers,

ordered more from the backing store. They would turn up a few days later – massive tomes that I

had to carry back to the Computer Science department to copy. Then it would be the walk (or run!)

back down the hill, doing the family shopping if time before the bus left. Fortunately buses are

good for thinking on.

I was working hard out of frustration! I wanted to get things changed and the world kept behaving

like a wall of cotton wool! I would hit it and it would not hit back! I wanted someone to explain

just why physics had gone so wrong, or to tell me where I was wrong, or to give me one good

reason for not checking out the realist alternatives more carefully.

One of the people I hit was John Gribbin, who I knew as a contributor to the New Scientist. I got

the impression he was pretty intelligent, and in one article he had said that maybe a new theory of

gravity was needed. So I wrote and told him about mine, and about all my other ideas for sorting

out how the universe worked. This was very soon after my encounter with Penrose, long before I

had discovered the full extent of the inertia I was up against. His response was not quite that of

cotton wool. I found it odd, but definitely, on second thoughts, pleasing. He wrote me a very short

note suggesting that I do a physics degree. (When I contacted him again several years later, he was

one of the people who encouraged me to write a book.)

How could I make time for a degree course? I’d have liked to in a way but I was too busy! I used

to talk to physics students sometimes. Though they could “do the maths”, I reckoned I already

knew more. I hadn’t read all the Feynman lectures, or the whole of Born and Wolf’s Optics, or the

whole of Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, but I’d at least glanced through them. I knew I’d

have dreadful trouble with the maths, though. I couldn’t do a single one of the worked examples.

Whether this was because my maths was rusty or because in fact the only way to do them was to

learn the approved answers by heart I don’t know.

So I haven’t done a physics degree. A year or two later I thought of doing a PhD, but that’s another

story.

But Yes, I was pleased by John’s note. I did realise that I was an outsider trying to tell experts how

to do their own job! I did realise that I was lucky to get any response at all. Yes, this was my first

little victory, for the unfortunate Roger Penrose had been given no option. He could not, in front of

the others in the lounge, have simply ignored me.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 17

There had been as yet no progress on the EPR front, though. Gribbin had not commented on it, and

I now realized that Penrose might not even have been listening. I was beginning to get the picture:

the famous get used to dealing with crackpots. This was not good enough!

I re-wrote my paper once again. At some point round about this time I had gone down to the

National Library of Wales (a few yards down from the university) and looked up references to

Aspect’s work in Science Citations – yet more massive tomes, these in the smallest print

imaginable. I had come across many depressing references, quoting the impression that the

experiments demonstrated non-locality, but I had also come across an article by Emilio Santos and

this had led me to a book by Franco Selleri. I had not read the article carefully, but it was clear that

there were other realists in the world, and clear that the book might tell me what I needed to know.

Had others already discovered all my possible explanations?

Technical problems once again had to be overcome. Selleri’s book was not in the library (scarcely

surprising really, as it is little more than a collection of papers delivered at a conference) and,

though I had my library ticket it did not give me automatic right to obtain books on “inter-library

loan”. My good friend Horst came to the rescue, though. In a few weeks the precious book was in

my hands. It was wonderful! Selleri was a genius (he had written a long introduction)! I couldn’t

afford to buy it, but copied some fair chunks. I devoured it from cover to cover, coming across one

paper that hinted at an understanding of the timing problem that had interested me, others talking

about the detection loophole, others about later experimental tests.

Looking back at my notes, I find that it also contained some of the usual theoretical fantasy. There

was a serious article by Sir Henry Stapp, mentioning that Bell's inequality has been called 'the most

profound discovery of science'. He also said: “[The quantum theory] predictions are, for the

experiments under consideration, expressions of the core ideas of quantum theory: the possibility

that they are seriously incorrect appears to me to be extremely unlikely.” There was one by Olivier

Costa de Beauregard, talking about a "paradox ... created by actually performed acts of observation,

and [propagated] backward in time ...from the region of measurement to the source." And this was

physics? (He was one of the people to whom I later sent my “Explosion of a Quantum Myth”

paper. He placed a bet: QM would eventually be proved right!)

Never mind! The book introduced me to Saverio Pascazio (who was to play a key part in my story,

albeit only for a short period) and Trevor Marshall, who is still a factor in my life.

It was probably this book that gave me the idea of approaching John Rarity. (No, my diary says

otherwise: I read Rarity and Tapster’s 1990 paper the same day I ordered the book – June 14, 1994.)

The hand of fate had been strong: the previous day I had stumbled on Santos’ 1991 paper19 while

checking up a quite different one that I had first seen in January, by an S Roy, who had solemnly

informed the world that quantum theory was all right because "observables at spacelike separation

commute. This implies 'signal locality'". Hmmm... I was beginning to catch on to the jargon!

Anyway, for some totally inexplicable reason, when I looked up the journal reference I found not

Roy but Santos. I really must check some day! You can’t have two papers with the same journal,

same volume, same page number! Anyway, it was Santos’ paper that had had the vital reference to

Selleri and one to Rarity and Tapster.) Rarity is an experimenter who works not so far from where

I live. He was at the Defence Research Establishment at Malvern. I wrote to him.

19 Santos, E, “Does Quantum Mechanics Violate the Bell Inequalities?”, Physical Review Letters 66, 1388 (1991).

Adventures of a Realist

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5. The Mysterious Ways of Physicists

Alan Duncan, John Rarity, Trevor Marshall

“ ... quantum theory demands an intellectual sacrifice – renunciation of the

complete determinability ... Bounds must be imposed on reason and

understanding, because Nature seems to exhibit features which are irrational

and unintelligible ...” Max Born, The Restless Universe, Blackie and Son

1935, p223

Inspired by my “bible” (Selleri’s book), I polished up my paper once again and posted it off to a

few people – not all at once, but as the mood took me. It was to be another year before I

approached Alain Aspect himself (he never responded, though from 1995 onwards I sent copies of

all my papers.) In 1994 I was still feeling my way, desperate to check how all the apparatus

worked, find out why experimenters had done what they had. Technically, John Rarity was the

second person I contacted, but his reply arrived well ahead of any other: it came within a week.

John works in communications at Malvern. I did not really pretend to have understood either of the

experiments I’d studied20,21, yet I could see that they both lay wide open to the notorious detection

loophole. I asked about that, and also about my current pet hypothesis, timing. He responded, as I

said, within a few days! Perhaps my task was not so impossible after all. Perhaps it would be

completed in a few more weeks – which would be just as well as my attempts at getting funding

had so far fallen on stony ground. I was delighted. He gave me some praise for my paper and also

made me feel really honoured: he sent me a pre-publication copy of his latest paper22, only just

accepted in Physical Review Letters!

And he gave me his email address. I liked that. It made me feel almost part of his community – as

if I was physically much closer – even though I was 18 miles from the computer at Aberystwyth

where I had my email access. This feeling was an illusion, of course, caused by what to me was a

novelty. Though I had just finished a Computer Science course, I was not really au fait with the

Internet. I had used email only a little, not venturing to learn how to use one of the modern

interfaces. I had not found out how to “surf”. (I still have little use for surfing, much preferring to

read published papers. Of course, most of the references I look up these days do come from the

Internet: they are from the quantum physics section of the archive at Los Alamos, from which, five

times a week, I still receive a list of abstracts. They serve as a constant reminder that my mission is

still not accomplished.)

Basically, John said he thought my paper good, though he also thought it would not go down well

with the community unless I phrased things a little differently. This has been my problem all along.

Once I understand something, I explain it to others as simply as I can. I’m not good at diplomacy.

Even with “my own side” I have problems! My Storrs conference paper that I later revised for

publication in “Infinite Energy Magazine” attracted the comment that I was too “cocksure”, and this

20 Rarity, J G and P R Tapster, “Two-color Photons and nonlocality in fourth-order interference”, Physical Review A

41, 5139 (1990)

21 Rarity, J G and P R Tapster, “Experimental Violation of Bell's Inequality Based on Phase and Momentum”, Physical

Review Letters 64, 2495 (1990)

22 Tapster, P R, J G Rarity and P C M Owens, “Violation of Bell's inequality over 4 km of optical fibre”, Physical

Review Letters 73, 1923 (1994)

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 19

was from a referee who I am sure was on my side. He was telling me the same message as Rarity,

that my audience would not carry on reading if they felt they were being insulted. It’s difficult,

though! Why do people have to be so sensitive? Aren’t scientists supposed to be able to admit that

they’ve made mistakes? Isn’t their desire to discover the truth stronger than their pride?

John had implied that he already understood the detection loophole, yet he did not seem to have

thought it applied to his own experiment. He was suspicious about my timing ideas, thinking I was

talking about breaking some fundamental law. (I have found that many people in the field have

great mental blocks about time and the propagation of light. Einstein’s special relativity has totally

confused them ... but that is yet another story, and not one in which I wish to get involved right

now.)

Anyway, I studied his new paper intensely, and got back to him with questions about it. He

answered some, but his enthusiasm soon waned. We were not quite on the same wavelength. He

did not respond to my suggestion that I come and visit him. Looking back, I think he was not so

much interested in my paper as, understandably enough, pleased to have somebody take an interest

in his own. At the time, my thrill at his friendly first message gradually changed to disillusion. He

just did not seem all that concerned about establishing what had actually happened – what had

actually caused his pretty oscillations that he had felt able to declare had supported quantum

mechanics. He is, after all, a communications expert! What’s the difference, from his point of

view, between an effect caused by obedience to non-local laws of QM and the same effect caused

by, for example, nonlinear responses in the detectors?

There is a difference, of course: if QM is wrong then your fancy “quantum” encryption method

based on it will not be as secure as you think, but meantime you will have got funding for a project

that will lead to methods that are usable, possibly better than previous ones. From a practical point

of view there seems to be no harm done. As Santos had said in his 1991 paper, though:

“This wrong belief [that local realistic models have been empirically refuted] ... has stopped

the search for truly reliable experiments, and so it has delayed the solution of an extremely

important open problem, by almost a quarter of a century.”

In the long term, it would be of benefit to the Rarity’s of this world to work with a true model rather

than a false one! They would find it easier to explain their work to others as well as easier to make

predictions.

Years later I was to discover that, both in this instance and many others, the true model behind

Rarity’s actual experiment was, though definitely not the QM one, not fully covered by anything I

had so far taken into account. Another artifact was involved, one that Marshall, Santos and Selleri

had explored briefly in 1985 and not followed up as it had seemed, on the basis of the one set of

data they considered, of little importance. I had not yet looked into it myself, and might never have

done so if it had not been for a lucky contact with some delightful Australians ...

* * * * * * * *

My next response came out of the blue, long after I’d given up hope. It was from Alan Duncan, up

in Stirling, Scotland, to whom I’d written at the end of July, a week before Rarity. It was now

September. He had been part of a team that had done some interesting experiments23,24 in which

they thought they had a little more of the necessary information for a valid test. They seemed to

23 Perrie, W and Duncan, A J and Beyer, H J and Kleinpoppen, H, PRL 54, 1790 (1985)

24.Haji-Hassan, T, A J Duncan, W Perrie, H J Beyer, H Kleinpoppen, Physics Letters A 123, 110 (1987)

Adventures of a Realist

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, November 22, 2020 20

have the infamous detection loophole under control – as I later discovered, they had had “useful

discussions” with Professor F. Selleri and had read and apparently understood that vital 1983 paper

of Marshall, Santos and Selleri’s. They were out to get to the bottom of the matter! With the

detection loophole not relevant to their tests, I thought my timing hypothesis might come into its

own, so this is what I concentrated on in my letters.

Duncan and Kleinpoppen had been the main contributors on the experimental side in “the book”,

reporting on all the work to date, including a few experiments that it was clear they did not rate

highly – so far as providing any convincing proof one way or the other in the quantum theory

versus realism debate is concerned, that is. There is one experiment in particular that you will quite

often see referenced – Lamehi-Rachti and Mittig’s one using “low energy proton-proton

scattering”25. It was doubtless a great technological achievement – indeed, they all are – but as

proof of quantum entanglement, No, it was of no value at all. It involved some horrendous

manipulation of the data before any test could be done. I have seen two reports on it now, in

Clauser and Shimony’s 1978 review paper26 and this one in Selleri’s book, and both hint at doubts.

It could not possibly have proved anything, and yet there it is. It seems there is virtually no “quality

control” in this science business! The idea that bad theories will be refuted experimentally just

doesn’t work: this is an experiment, yet you can’t tell without several hours of hard concentration

that it is, from our present point of view, a bad one. Once that initial screening by referees has been

done, that’s it. Once published, few will read it and still fewer think of criticising it. Those who

find its declared results useful cannot be blamed for quoting it.

Anyway, Duncan answered my letters very kindly. He seemed to approve of my project and sent

me a complete set of the Stirling publications on the subject, but warned me of what I was up

against (as if I did not know by now!). He quoted the old patter about the success of quantum

theory, and Niels Bohr (or was in Feynman?) on the fact that nobody understands it. Didn’t Bohr

say something to the effect that if you think you understand it you must be deceiving yourself?

What a theory!

On the practical side, though, this was another frustration: he no longer worked on the subject and

could not answer my question about timing. I wrote again a few months later, saying he was the

only person I knew who could help, but he was adamant. The data had been thrown away. He was

“glad to see that I still had the bit between my teeth”, though, which warmed my heart to him. I’d

have loved to go up there to see him and pick his brains, but he was busy. It was not to be. A year

later, when there was a conference in Durham, I wrote again with my latest ideas and suggested we

might meet, Durham being nearer than Stirling, but he didn’t reply. Now, sadly, he is no longer

with us – I saw his obituary in Physics World – and I very much regret not having tried harder. If I

had been less shy I would have phoned him. Looking back at those papers, I think the break-up of

his team was the turning point, the point at which this area of physics simply abandoned any

semblance of “scientific morality” – of genuine search for the truth.

[Trevor Marshall, as I found out from a phone conversation some time later, thought the rot

had set in before this. For some reason the Stirling team had taken notice of the part of

the1983 paper that concerned the detection loophole but ignored the section on

“enhancement”. The test they used depended on the “no enhancement” assumption – that

there were no signals that had greater probability of detection when polarisers were present

than when they were absent. Trevor was not satisfied that they could rely on this. I’m not

sure I agree. I think of the Stirling group as an isolated pocket of resistance, still struggling

25 Lamehi-Rachti, M and W Mittig, Phys Rev D 14, 2543 (1976)

26 Clauser, J F and A Shimony, Reports in Progress in Physics 41, 1881 (1978)

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 21

towards the truth, not merely (as I have heard suggested of Aspect’s experiments by

someone with every reason to know what he was talking about) conducting real-time

simulations of quantum theory predictions. They could have had good reason to suppose

there was no enhancement in their experiment.]

Now if this had been agricultural research – the area in which I had once been employed as a

statistician – this utter and total waste of all the Stirling team’s work could not have happened. The

data, at least, would have been preserved. In theory at any rate, at East Malling Research Station

the data could not simply have been thrown away. Every experiment was properly documented,

and every single scrap of data filed. It went into the “Records Office”, and was available in

perpetuum in case anyone such as me turned up later and wanted to find out the truth. Evidently in

pure physics research things were different: admittedly there were no apple trees involved whose

history has to be remembered, but weren’t there other reasons for keeping the raw data? I was

shocked. Very likely the results they collected in these experiments would have been voluminous

and could not possibly have been kept on the hand-written sheets I was used to, but this was 1985,

not 1900! Could they not have put it straight on a computer? Electronic records could have been

archived.

* * * * * * * *

The chapter I had found most inspiring in Selleri’s book had been the one by Trevor Marshall. He

had a theory that I had never met before, Stochastic Electrodynamics. It seemed to bear some

relation to my own ideas. I had already formulated the idea that the detection of the very low-

intensity light in Aspect’s experiments was a matter of adding “noise” to the signal and then

counting as a “photon” all totals that exceeded some threshold. His idea was that there were

effectively random light waves throughout space and these combined with the signal to influence

the proportion that went one way or the other at two-channel polariser. I liked what he wrote, both

content and style. Moreover, he lived in Manchester, just “around the corner”. (You will notice

that all my first approaches were within the United Kingdom: I always had in mind the possibility

of visits and, having developed a bit of a phobia about travelling, I kept as local as possible!)

Trevor took a long time to reply. I’d given up hope when suddenly I received a long, rambling,

enthusiastic, letter, encouraging me in every way and inviting me to visit him, either in Manchester

or in his cottage in North Wales! I was more than thrilled. I have to confess that I fell for this

man, despite his appalling handwriting. I was an emotional mess. I wrote back, of course, and a

few weeks later, after delays caused by a bad cough, my husband dropped me off at his home.

After a quick cup of coffee, he consigned me to the mercy of this lanky and unshaven but kindly-

looking man, rushing off to pick up our daughter from Birmingham.

I stayed a few days, and we talked non-stop. We walked with his dog by the river in the late

December sun, studied his papers, and lived, so far as I remember, on baked potatoes, getting into

trouble with his wife Natalie when we forgot to put them in the oven in time. (Domestic

arrangements were very relaxed, putting me totally at ease.) Trevor and I had the first of many

arguments. He did not like my ideas on timing! To this day, I don’t think he was justified, from a

logical or scientific stance. I suppose he wanted us to present a united front. Let’s all shout

together “Realists back the detection loophole!”. This was, after all, probably the most important

one, or so we both thought at the time.

There was more to it than that, though. It was not just this little detail of the EPR experiments. He

was looking to build a complete mathematical theory, ready to replace quantum theory when its

faults became too obvious to paper over. He considered that he had already got one – his

“Stochastic Electrodynamics” or SED. It turned out that he had played a major part in its

development, and his allegiance to it had been the main reason for his decision to take “early

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retirement” from his post at Manchester University. He had refused to teach the orthodox quantum

theory on the curriculum.

SED is a theory that takes over a large body of the mathematics of QED – Quantum

Electrodynamics – and represents a continuous development of ideas traceable back to Planck,

Ernst and Ehrenfest at the beginning of the 20th century. It does not seem to bear much relation to

the version of QED I’d met in Feynman’s little book. QED is a purely particle theory, with not

only electrons and such like considered to be particles but light and even the forces within the atom

all being carried by their own special variants. (I later (March, 2000) read an article in Physics

Today with the title “Brainwashed by Feynman”27. It could have taken the words out of my

mouth!) To return to Trevor’s theory: its great virtues are that it is a pure wave theory and that

everything in it is real. There are none of the “virtual particles” with which Dirac had populated the

vacuum. It is instead filled with electromagnetic waves, forming what Trevor calls the “zero point

field” or ZPF. There are none of quantum theory’s “complex amplitudes”, supposed to completely

model reality by means of the probabilities of detection of particles. This had been one of the

aspects of quantum theory that Einstein had hated. I had empathy with these aspects of SED, but,

Oh Dear, it had become a mathematical formalism, not necessarily a model of what really

happened!

Perhaps I can see now what Trevor was trying to do. By building this theory that linked to existing

ones, he had a chance of getting people to listen, building a team with a goal that could be shared.

Though retired, he spends some of his time in Spain, doing a little lecturing and working with

Emilio Santos (this had been the reason for the delay in his first letter: my documents had chased

him to Spain and back). He has a small following, and his latest idea is being tested, whilst I, of

course, remain totally on my own. But I feel he has sacrificed some principles, and that this is

where the orthodox quantum theorists had gone wrong. The “Founding Fathers” of quantum theory

had artificially suppressed their differences, under the leadership of Bohr. Louis de Broglie, for

example, had originally thought in terms of real waves, not “probability” ones, but had gone along

with the others in working with probabilities for most of his life. Only towards the end did he

return to what he really felt was right28. Dirac, as I now know29, thought towards the end that

possibly the real world was in fact deterministic, that they had only worked with their formalism for

lack of anything better. Poor Schrödinger had been brought to tears by arguments with Bohr about

the emission of light. It was not an instantaneous effect taking place when there was a “quantum

jump”, but – and I think this very likely – arose from the

“simultaneous excitation of two stationary material vibrations whose interference gives rise

to the emission of electromagnetic waves, eg light.” [Heisenberg, quoting Schrödinger30]

And of course Trevor also needed an intelligent disciple, technical assistant and secretary! His

office was a mountain of unsorted papers – rather impressive, accentuating his image as the untidy

Einstein, complete with fly-away hair and scruffy clothes. I was a great disappointment to him,

having as yet not even had the courage to set up my own web site, let alone his, and being firmly

averse to any form of tidying. (Why let it get into that mess in the first place? Hmmm ... Looking

round me now, who am I to talk?)

27 Anderson, Philip W, “Brainwashed by Feynman?”, Physics Today, pp11-12, February 2000

28 French, A P, “Einstein: A Centenary Volume”, Heinemann 1979

29 Dirac, Paul A M, “Directions in Physics”, John Wiley and Sons 1978

30 Heisenberg, Werner, “Physics and Beyond”, Arnold J Pomerans (trans.), George Allen and Unwin 1971.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 23

Anyway, as regards physics, he was happy to teach but there were many areas on which he

adamantly refused to listen. He would simply switch off every time I tried to explain how the

aether worked – his theory didn’t need one. He would not listen to my ideas about lower-level

oscillations, underlying Maxwell’s electrodynamical ones. And he would not listen to my

reasoning about how the detectors in those experiments should be modelled. I knew by intuition

that his model was not quite good enough. He had allowed for random inputs from the “vacuum” at

the polarisers, but then had assumed that the actual detection process obeyed the standard neat

“square-law” rule. He was characterizing the detectors by just one number, the very same

“quantum efficiency” assumed in quantum theory. A year or so later I actually checked the maths:

his model gave nice smooth curves for a small range of choices of his “noise” parameter, but he had

had to introduce an artificial, hard, cutoff point, and this could make the curves have sudden

uncomfortable changes in slope. Though by a slight modification these could have been smoothed,

I felt they were indicative of a logical fault. He had not modelled the real detectors, had not

allowed for the noise there. It is this noise, I believe, that enables them to behave as they do,

converting changes in intensity into changes in probabilities. I remain sure to this day that

experiments could vindicate my ideas, but am still struggling to persuade somebody to check them

out ...

Trevor is a brilliant man, though. I forgave him all his sins – as Natalie had put it, he’s a “funny

old stick” – for I wanted to learn all that he knew. He really does seem to understand how the

minds of the quantum theorists work and how their maths achieves what it does. He taught me a

little, including such gems as Dirac’s belief that “the photon interferes only with itself”31 (On a

more serious note, Dirac’s 1930 book shows that he was at that time seriously misguided: my notes

include:

pp1-2: “... phenomena such as photo-electric emission and scattering by free electrons

show that light is composed of small particles ... A fraction of a photon is never observed, so

that we may safely assume it cannot exist.” [!!!!!!]

The exclamation marks are my own, dated around the end of December, 1994.)

Despite arguments and a state of exhaustion, I was really happy in Manchester. As the British

Telecom advertisement keeps telling us: “It’s good to talk!”

But I’ve left out a crucial conversation! For a few months I had been wondering about writing to

Saverio Pascazio, as I’d now read quite a few of his papers32 and wanted to discuss timing with him

– as so often, I had criticisms as well as praise. Trevor said I must write both to him and to Franco

Selleri. Apparently Trevor and Franco had fallen out some years ago – each blames the other – but

nevertheless he said I must write. Not only write but invite myself to visit him! What, me?

Approach this great man? The thought took a bit of getting used to. My diary tells me that I did

the easy letter first: I wrote to Pascazio as soon as I got home.

Trevor had invited me to join him in his cottage, but first he had to go to Spain. We had exchanged

a mountain of letters and email, and all sorts adventures had befallen me before we were once again

walking, talking and arguing, the bracing March wind in the hills above Deiniolen, North Wales,

replacing the warm winter sun by the Mersey. By that time, I had been invited to Italy and was

thinking about preparing my first ever “seminar”.

31 Dirac, P A M, “The Principles of Quantum Mechanics”, 1930

32 Pascazio, Saverio, “Experimental Tests of Bell Inequalities. Are all local models really excluded?”, Physics Letters

111, 339-342, 1985; Pascazio, Saverio, “Time and Bell-Type Inequalities”, Physics Letters A 118, 47-53 (1986)

Adventures of a Realist

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6. Franco’s Club

Visit to Euan Squires in Durham and seminar for Selleri in Bari

In February 1994 I had stumbled across one of the few books in the Physical Sciences Library at the

University of Wales, Aberystwyth, to actually mention the EPR paradox. It was a small and

readable book by Euan Squires, “The Mystery of the Quantum World”, destined to play an

important role in my life. I liked it very much, though, of course, Euan knew little about the actual

experiments and was as confused as anyone else about their true explanation. I liked very much a

little bit of doggerel that he quoted from his university days (at Manchester, I believe). It started:

At Bohr’s feet I kneel me down –

I have no theories of my own ...

At the end of September I read it more carefully, and next month wrote to Squires, sending the very

latest version of “Explosion of a Quantum Myth”, which by now quoted his work. Ten days later

he replied. He invited me to “informal talks on the Foundations of Quantum Theory and

Cosmology” in Durham, October 24 - November 1. As it was now October 24, I’d have missed the

beginning, but he recommended the Friday talks: on October 28 Lucien Hardy was to speak on

“Locality Issues”. Philip Pearle was to be there, too. I hadn’t yet met Hardy’s work, but Pearle I

knew as a key figure in the EPR story, author of the first paper on the detection loophole33 way

back in 1970. But I was not good at quick decisions, and, besides, I had that cough – I am

backtracking here to before my visit to Manchester. Moreover, though of course I did not say this, I

had a phobia about travelling, and was considerably scared at the prospect of meeting “real

physicists” face to face! It was to take several weeks before courage, health and curiosity were

primed sufficiently for my visit to Trevor – my initiation. I thanked Euan but declined this time.

We continued correspondence, though, over the next few months, and in the middle of February,

1995, I found myself on the train to Durham.

The visit was not a huge success in itself. I had assumed that the people present – Squires, Hardy

and a student) would all have read my paper carefully and understood it! I was taken aback at

being asked to go through it, though I did so with reasonable competence. They put me up at a very

comfortable hotel and we had a posh dinner there, which I found somewhat of a strain. I sensed

that Lucien was uncomfortable. I think he fully understands the detection loophole but (and later

events bore this out) would rather it was not mentioned. It is, it seems, an article of faith with him

that it is of little importance. The best part of the visit was the trip back to the station in the

morning! Squires took me in his car and we had our only genuine talk. I got the very distinct

impression that he liked my ideas – all of them, the ones on the aether and the nature of

electromagnetism as well as EPR – much better than he had said openly.

The facts of life were gradually becoming clear: Euan was Head of the Department of Mathematical

Physics, and had responsibilities towards his students. He had been writing papers for years, and

they had been influenced by the apparent success of quantum theory in Aspect’s experiments. He

had gradually built into his ideas the assumption that the “collapse of the wave function” and some

of the other weird quantum effects really happened. He had students doing PhD’s on subjects

related to these. He couldn’t sweep the ground from under their feet! They – their future careers –

were the most important consideration for him, yet there was, fortunately, nothing to stop him from

encouraging me. Franco Selleri is, I imagine, in the same boat.

* * * * * * * *

33 Pearle, P: “Hidden-Variable Example Based upon Data Rejection”, Physical Review D 2, 1418-25 (1970)

Caroline H Thompson

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18:9:00

Meantime things had been happening thick and fast. Through Saverio Pascazio I was making

contacts all over the world. Not many, but they had fascinating names and I could only assume that

some, at least, were influential. I had written to Pascazio in December, and in January had a very

pleasing reply. He understood my ideas, or nearly so – we subsequently exchanged several emails

on technical matters – and sent a list of a dozen names and addresses of people who might like to

see my paper. He was very helpful. When I asked for more information on them, he gave me little

resumés on each! About the only one I had heard of before was Selleri. (I’m not sure if I realized it

at the time, but Pascazio was in Selleri’s department at the University of Bari, Italy.)

And so it came to pass that, early in February 1995, I wrote to Professor Franco Selleri. Quite apart

from my trepidation at approaching a great man, this was not without its risks. Trevor had made it

quite clear that he and Franco were not on speaking terms: I could choose to join one or the other

but not both (I’ve been walking a tight-rope ever since). I badly wanted to continue my friendship

with Trevor – I needed, if nothing else, a “brick wall” against which to try out my ideas, and these

were currently burgeoning! Partly under his guidance, I was reading books such as Whittaker’s

Theories of the Aether34, and daily refining my own version. But I had to write, I would never

have forgiven myself otherwise.

A few weeks later had a reply that went beyond my wildest hopes. It was so warm, so enthusiastic!

My paper, he said, was “incredibly good”, and who was I? Could I come to Bari to give a seminar?

Once again, I was bowled over! Franco had said that he could pay “local expenses”. How could I

afford the air fare? I immediately went to Frank Bott and showed him the letter: could the

Computer Science Department possibly help out? On this occasion, they said yes, they might be

able to, though in the event Franco paid all expenses and I did not take the Department up on this

till another occasion. After a quick exchange of faxed messages, my visit became a certainty.

* * * * * * * *

First, however, came a visit to North Wales, to Trevor Marshall’s holiday cottage. Though not far

as the crow flies, it was a long bus journey. I remember being met at the bus station in Caernarvon,

then going on a walk with his dog along a wild open beach, stung in the face by a freak hail storm.

I had come reasonably well-prepared, but it was cold. Not to worry. We talked physics. The

cottage was cold, too! So much for my visions of civilization! I had imagined that he would have

had a kindly neighbour who would have come in to warm the place up, but no. Trevor is a bit of a

spartan. He can cook, though, when occasion demands, and this time, between us, we did rather

well.

The idea of the visit was that he should help me prepare for my “seminar”, but this was a limited

success! It did give me the general idea – useful guidance on the amount of material one should put

on a slide, speaking slowly for the benefit of a foreign audience and that kind of thing – but when it

came to what I was actually going to say, my ideas were totally different. So that project was

shelved. We had plenty of other things to talk about. He taught me some more of his SED

(Stochastic Electrodynamics) theory, and I once again tried to explain my ideas on timing in the

EPR experiments. We had our first shouting match! We were walking up a snow-covered hill, and

he just would not listen! And I would not listen! I think what he had in the back of his mind was

that it was most unlikely that the effect I was talking about was large, but this is not what he said

.... I felt that as a scientist he ought to have been just a little more receptive. Part of the point was

34 Whittaker, Sir Edmund, “A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity”, Nelson, London, 1951

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that this was a feature of the experiments that ought to have been discussed in the published papers,

as it was a logical possibility (and “No!” the fact that my model was not quite factorable did not

imply that it was “non-local”!)

As you may guess, this feud is still simmering today (but what’s this I see in my diary? Apparently

I thought we’d resolved it back in April, 1995!), but it did not prevent me enjoying my stay, battling

against the challenges of the cottage. The invitation was repeated, so presumably Trevor did not

take our arguments too much to heart. There were to be several of these trips to Deiniolen in the

next year or so, sometimes on my own, sometimes with other members of his family, or with Max

Wallis (co-author of that vital New Scientist book review that had started the whole thing off). I

think it was on my second visit (for the purposes of testing out my talk, just a few days before my

Bari trip) we had floods in the kitchen. There were two recurring themes in these visits: we argued,

and Trevor spent considerable time poking around in drains trying to solve the flooding! There

were other enlivening incidents, such as when (at age 60 plus) he had to climb in an upstairs

window because he’d forgotten the key, or over a fence to disengage his daughter’s large dog from

the neck of a sheep! I always went back refreshed. It’s a funny old world.

* * * * * * * *

Meantime I’d been receiving more letters from abroad. There was Olivier Costa de Beauregard,

who told me that Aspect’s experiments had won him two bets and he was prepared to place another,

on the continued success of quantum mechanics! De Beauregard is, I fear, a lost soul – one of the

many who have thought too hard in their lives about things illogical, and ended up in a strange

fantasy world in which time can go backwards and all things are possible. He was friendly, though,

and sent his latest paper35. I’m afraid I found it hard to take it seriously! How could he write in all

sincerity that "the arrowlessness of causality at the quanta level was a straightforward formalization

of the S matrix scheme, which shows that causality is CPT invariant in quantum mechanics"?

There was Serge Caser, who had been at the same university as Alain Aspect, who told me about

how he had tried to talk to Aspect about the experiments, which he thought had been

misinterpreted. He thought, like me, that there was no proof here of anything weird. Caser, too,

sent a paper36, and this included some ideas that I liked about “local vacua”. I thought they seemed

similar to my intuitive idea about every particle carrying its own aether region along with it. (Had I

by then written my “Lorentz and the Aether” essay, I wonder?) I already knew from Pascazio that

he had done some useful work on the EPR experiments: he had discovered, as I had, that

asymmetry could help account for the results37. Aspect’s experiments, by the way, had not been

symmetrical. I had a little correspondence with Caser a few years later. He was intending to write

a book ...

There were a few others, but the planned seminar in Bari dominated all else. A great deal of

correspondence was involved, some by fax, some email, some “snail mail”, mostly with Saverio

Pascazio, who had been put in charge. I even had to ’phone him once – believe it or not, this was

the very first time in my life I had ’phoned abroad.

I had made a new friend in the Physics Department – David Falla, a physicist who had known that

most notorious of “dissidents”, Feyerabend, when he’d been in Bristol. With his help I arranged to

try out my speech in front of a group of physicists. I was quite petrified at the prospect! Maybe it

would not be quite as bad, though, as the run-through I’d given to Trevor. That had been pretty

35 De Beauregard, O Costa, “Timing in EPR Correlations”, Foundations of Physics 5, 489-491, 1992

36 Caser, Serge, “Local Vacua”, pp19-35 of “Wave-Particle Duality”, Franco Selleri (ed.), Plenum Press, 1992

37 Caser, Serge, “Objective local theories and the symmetry between analysers”, Physics Letters A, 102, 152-8, 1984

Caroline H Thompson

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terrible: it was not that it was a bad talk, but I knew he would not agree with what I said. I’d

needed a stiff drink afterwards! Anyway, just a few days before I was due to depart, I spoke in the

“Data Room” to a very select audience: Keith Birkinshaw (acting head of Physics), David Falla

(semi-retired physics lecturer), Wil Wilkinson (then lecturing on matters including an introduction

to quantum theory) and my good friend Horst Holstein from Computer Science. I survived, and

was very glad I’d done it. I felt I was just about ready for the real thing.

* * * * * * * *

21:9:00

And so it came to pass that, on April 29, 1995, I was greeted at Bari airport by Franco. He was just

like me! He immediately started talking physics! He thrust into my hands a couple of presents – a

book on John Bell and a souvenir plate from the university – at the same time flooding me with a

stream of questions. How had I come across my ideas? How did I have the courage to challenge

quantum theory? He drove me to my hotel, a small one in an older part of town. Not the really old

part, of course. I was soon to find out that he was very serious about the crime problem –

something I had found it curious he should have mentioned in our correspondence. One did not

venture into the oldest parts of Bari alone, and nowhere was it safe to carry a hand-bag for fear of

mugging.

I’d arrived on a Saturday, and the Monday happened to be a festival day, so for two days I was

entertained in style. I had the undivided attention of two very interesting men – Saverio (who, by

the way, is young and handsome as well as extremely intelligent!) and Franco (an impressive figure

in his way, but more my own age). They took me around the sights, Saverio helping with my

camera, which is old and needs a little old-fashioned expertise to adjust.

All was well until the last minute: Franco had devoted an entire day to me, but in the evening he

had to spend some time with his family. He still hasn’t forgiven himself for having to leave me on

my own for one meal. I went to the restaurant around the corner from the hotel, where I’d been the

first night. And I took a bag! Not what I’d have called a “hand-bag”, but a bag nevertheless. I

needed it to put my spectacles in, and a dictionary and a few other bits and pieces, keeping my

money safely in my pocket. On the way back, I held it close, but at the last minute, just by the

door, I must have relaxed. A young man appeared from nowhere, rushed past between me and the

door, and my bag was gone and he was on the back of the waiting scooter before I could draw

breath! Exactly as I’d been told to expect, but I was somewhat taken aback all the same. I told the

hotel staff but they showed little interest. I’d have rung Franco or Saverio only their phone

numbers had been in that bag.

Ah well, all part of my education I suppose, and as Franco told me later it could have been much

worse. One visitor he knew had had her arm broken, as well as losing all her belongings! There

was nothing in the bag that they’d have wanted – yet another instance of the illogicality of the

world, as I’d have liked to have had my diary notes back, and my specs and my dictionary. I had to

carry my papers for my talk the next day in a plastic bag. Later I had an interesting time at an

opticians with Franco, having an eye test in Italian and choosing new glasses, and with Saverio

choosing a new bag. I’ve still got the frames that Franco helped to choose – I’m wearing them

now, but with different lenses.

This all cut into a tight schedule, though. I was only going to have one and a half days at the

university and I’d got people I wanted to talk to and a book to read! Trevor had told me that Franco

had a copy of the thesis – Alain Aspect’s. On the morning before my talk I saw it for the first time.

It was in French, which I read only with difficulty, but somehow I managed in a very short space of

time to come across one of the “anomalies”. There are several in the thesis, and I think they are all

of critical importance. They are indications that he was not seeing exactly what quantum theory

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had predicted, and they hold some of the clues as to what is really happening. I was immediately

sure that my “realist” model would be happy to deal with the little fact that I’d found: the number of

coincidences of type ‘+–’ should have equalled the number of type ‘–+’ and it didn’t!

My talk was to be after lunch, and Maria Tarantino, who teaches English to physicists, wanted a

chance to brush up her skills. She and I went out to a restaurant, a short walk down the road. We

talked a great deal and drank a bottle of wine, losing track of time. About five minutes before my

talk was due to start we realized it! I arrived back at Franco’s office quite considerably hot, but

(thanks to the wine?) not too concerned. Franco had not yet decided how to announce me, so we

had a quick consultation. It seemed that my catch-phrase was to be “The Impossible Does Not

Happen!”. Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it, yet to people who have been immersed in quantum theory for

many years, there is something very refreshing about it. They have been trained not to use the word

“impossible”, to accept that anything is possible until it is “proved experimentally” that it does not

happen. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten how to do valid experiments ... No, I ought

not to insult them, so let’s rephrase this: They are trying to do experiments that simply cannot be

done. (And it certainly does not help that they’ve abandoned the principle of causality!)

But I digress. It did not take long for Franco to settle on a few suitable words of introduction, and

off we went to the lecture room. There were only about twelve people there, and of these only a

very few had met the subject before. There were Augusto Garrucio and Gino Lepore and Franco

and Saverio, but I’m not sure that anyone else was really working in the field. They had come to

learn English. Whoever they were, I only had a hazy view of them, of course, as I had no

spectacles!

I really enjoyed giving that talk. For somebody who has been the shiest of the shy all her life, it is

quite amazing to find that there is, after all, a “performer” lurking inside. Once over the first few

words, I play to my audience and revel in it. As I had expected, it went on quite long, so we had a

break in the middle for coffee. Then it was all over. I had not had much chance to talk to anyone

except Saverio.

Next day I got poor Saverio worried. He was in charge of getting me to the airport, and I had gone

missing! I had reminded Franco rather late that he had agreed to get me a copy of Aspect’s thesis.

I had not realized that he would have to do it himself. Off we went to the copier, and the gallant

man sweated away at the task. 400 pages, even when done two at a time, is quite a lot. I’d left a

note on the desk where I’d been stationed to tell Saverio where we were but he hadn’t seen it.

We’d just finished when he rushed in and chivvied me off to his car. No time for lunch. As a

matter of fact, I was getting dehydrated too – I don’t think I’d had a drink since breakfast. Luckily

there was time for a quick snack at the airport before I was off.

I had proved that I could talk, but if only I were more confident in other matters! If things had been

different – if I had been the kind of person to find her way alone around a strange town, and take a

snatched hand-bag in her stride – I might have been able to work with Selleri in Bari. The two of

us working together would have been a force to be reckoned with and might by now have made a

real impact on the “establishment”. I could, maybe, have been part of a team.

But no, once again this is illusion, born of some emotional moments over lunch in Martina Franca,

when Franco invited me to join his “club”, or intense discussions with Saverio involving trees

blowing down in forests and how to measure the speed of a rain storm. There had been other

moments that had spelled trouble.

I’d have needed to stay months to have a chance of sorting out our basic disagreement. I had not

before I came taken it seriously, but Franco really did think that light was emitted in “photons”. We

did a diagram of a light source with several photomultipliers set around it. He believed that only

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 29

one would be triggered at a time because only one photon would be emitted at a time. This belief

stemmed from his work in particle physics at CERN. I believed that it all depended on the choice

of photomultiplier! If they were sufficiently sensitive several would fire at once, and I based my

belief on my studies of Aspect’s experiments and on classical ideas gleaned from books such as

Lorentz’ “Problems of Modern Physics”.

Now, I would agree that a very small source could not produce a spherical wave of uniform

intensity in all directions: something in the source had to be oscillating, and the direction of

oscillation would define preferred directions. If it was oscillating in a North-South direction you’d

get the strongest polarisation around the equator. Franco’s conviction that a light source produced

just one “photon” at a time, though, made no sense to me. (I have more recently come to the idea

that there could be a glimmer of truth in Franco’s picture: a large atom may possibly, sometimes,

emit a narrow beam of light, but this is a narrow beam, not a particle.)

I might have been able to work with Saverio if he had not been so busy teaching and had not

decided to abandon EPR matters and specialize in statistical mechanics, and that not in Bari but

Japan.

Nevertheless, I am proud to regard myself as a member of Franco’s “club”. He has never

mentioned this again, never told me who the other members are, but I assume that they are all

people who have realized that there is something rotten in the state of physics and would like to do

something about it. We are realists through and through. We are a team in spirit.

Adventures of a Realist

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7. Spain

A working holiday with Marshall and Santos in Spain

“The eye can never have too much seeing, so the mind is never satisfied with

sufficient truth.” Nicholas de Cusa, “On Learned Ignorance”, 1440. [From

Lerner92, p 85.]

I arrived back late on the evening of May 3rd, for the end of my daughter’s 18th birthday. My family

never did too well out of my physics activities – apart, that is, from the wonderful weather I

managed to bring them! I always seem to take my cool Welsh weather with me on my travels and

provide them with a heat wave – which is just as well as I do not like the heat. Anyway, I’d missed

Chloe’s birthday, then I was at a conference at a crucial point in Daniel’s career, and meetings with

their teachers tended to be spent talking about myself. It’s quite amazing how well they have

survived. Perhaps it was, after all, for the best that Daniel decided to drop mathematics. He’s now

very happy working with computers.

You may be pleased to hear that I am not going to inflict on you a day-by-day account of the next

month or so! I can’t remember it. I imagine I must have been in a state of exhaustion. My mind

was bursting with ideas, and both Franco and Trevor were setting me yet more challenges. In

addition to Aspect’s thesis, Franco had given me copies of the original reports of the “Sagnac”

experiments38, which are very important in relation to Special Relativity. (He has written some

papers on the latter, proving that our intuitive ideas on time really are the best39.) Trevor had set me

to study the Brown-Twiss experiments40, which are far from easy. The ones I read about concerned

a very indirect way of trying to measure the apparent diameter of a star. The effect used depends on

some interesting classical wave theory, though of course quantum theorists have now invented their

own “explanation” (Mark Silverman gives a very good discussion of this41, and of many other

fascinating effects in atomic physics and elsewhere – effects from various fields that all seem to me

to be better covered by classical theories than modern ones. When I wrote to him years later,

though, he denied that he was a classical theorist at heart!)

The excitement of Bari was followed with hardly a break by adventures in Spain. Trevor was

scheduled to go out there, mainly for the purposes of his student’s PhD presentation in Oviedo. He

thought it might be a good opportunity for me to meet Emilio Santos, to whom I’d written earlier in

the year. Emilio, by the way, was not entirely against my ideas on timing! He’d written an

encouraging letter, suggesting I publish in Foundations of Physics, though he warned me that there

were “already many ‘refutations’ of the claim that all hidden variable theories had been disproved”

so I might have some difficulty. (How is it that so many papers are still being published with no

reference to all these other ‘refutations’? It seems that the system is self-perpetuating. There are so

38 Sagnac, M G, “L'ether luminexu demontre par l'effet du vent relatif d'ether dans un interferometre en rotation

uniforme”, Comptes Rendus 157, 708-710, 1913; “Sur la preuve de la realite de l'ether lumineux par l'experience de

l'interferographe tournant”, Comptes Rendu 157, 1410-13, 1913; “Effet tourbillonnaire optique. La circulation de

l'ether lumineux dans un interferographe tournant”, Physikalische Zeitschrift 4, 177-195, 1914

39 Selleri, Franco, “Noninvariant one-way velocity of light and particle collisions”, Foundations of Physics Letters 9,

43-60 (1996)},

40 Brown, Hanbury R and R Q Twiss, “A New type of interferometer for use in radio astronomy”, Philosophical

Magazine 45, 663-682 (1954)},

41 Silverman, Mark P, “And Yet it Moves. Strange Systems and Subtle Questions in Physics”, Cambridge University

Press 1993

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 31

many thousands of papers that don’t mention them that it is easy to give an impressive list of

references that entirely avoids them!)

Anyway, somehow it happened that I was to go to Spain. Emilio was to pay local expenses, and

this time (but never again, I fear!) the Computer Science Department at Aberystwyth were

persuaded to pay for my travel. I found myself on the ferry, on my own – I had hoped to have

company this time – headed for Santander. But I honestly cannot remember all that much about it.

I must have started exhausted, having failed to sleep on the ferry, and remained so, partly due to the

traffic noise in the student flat where I stayed.

I had gone assuming that I would repeat my Bari talk, but Trevor and Emilio didn’t seem to think

that any of the students there would be interested, and, besides, were busy with their own projects.

Despite some slight language problems, I had some good talks with Emilio, though. He showed me

his latest ideas on the validity of Bell tests (probably correct, but not of immediate interest to me)

then we talked about the nature of light – whether it really was emitted in narrow “pencils” – and

about Parametric Down Conversion (PDC), which is the name given to the process used to produce

pairs of “photons” in most current EPR work and, indeed, in a great many other “quantum optics”

experiments.

I had an idea that PDC was (a) related to the Doppler shift and (b) something like Cerenkov

radiation – light emitted when a moving particle travels through a medium faster than the light that

it causes to be emitted. (This is not a matter of it going faster than that magic limit, c, only faster

than the speed of light within the medium, which will be less than c.) In PDC, light of one

frequency impinges on one face of a carefully-cut crystal of a “birefringent” substance – one for

which the speeds of propagation of vertically and horizontally polarized light are unequal. What

emerges is, according to quantum optics, a pair of “photons”, one vertically and one horizontally

polarized, whose energy adds exactly to that of the input. They go off in specific directions, in

accordance with the law of conservation of momentum. You get different “types” of down-

conversion depending on exactly how the crystal is orientated. I had been doing a lot of reading

around this subject in the past month or so, and a lot of thinking, but did not yet feel I had found

enough facts. I still haven’t. The subject seems to have been brought to a standstill by the quantum

theory photon ideas, which are so very definitely unhelpful! SED is certainly more suited to the

task, but I felt that some of its assumptions might be wrong. Later in the year I was to come across

a phenomenon, “induced coherence”, for which I became progressively more certain that the SED

model was wrong. But more of that later.

It was while I was in Emilio’s room one day that I came across a paper that introduced me to some

kindred spirits in Australia. It was by Sue Sulcs and Barry Gilbert, and Emilio was on the point of

throwing it away: it seemed to him to overlap with his own ideas but not say anything new. I found

some of it very interesting, though, so he gave it to me! Sue and Barry had, it seemed, not only

similar ideas about the EPR experiments but also the same philosophy, the same attitude towards

mathematical models, and even the same opinion as me about Lorentz Invariance. (It was a relief

to have an ally on this, after the frustration of trying to wean Trevor away from the idea.) Some

months later – or maybe the next year – I managed to contact the authors, but that, too, is a story to

be told later.

Another subject I’d been concentrating on recently had been “asymmetry” (as you may or may not

remember, Serge Caser had proved that it could be an important factor in Bell test violations). I

regret to say that this triggered another of the Marshall-Thompson shouting matches! Trevor had

been trying to get me interested in his exact model for the basic EPR experiment. He wanted me to

get down to it and check the maths. (And I eventually did, though it was not at all easy as my skill

in this direction was severely eroded by 20-odd years of neglect!) He was trying to explain, but I

kept interrupting! He would say a few words, and I would butt in: “But what if we make the two

Adventures of a Realist

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sides different at this stage? If we have asymmetry look, we don’t need to do so-and-so ...”. This

did not go down well, and resulted in an incident that is best forgotten!

Fortunately he forgave me, and this incident didn’t spoil our expedition to the mountains for a day

(exceedingly energetic, starting with a half-mile run for the bus!) or a dinner-party that he gave for

his friends. It was almost a relaxing holiday! But – horror of horrors – Trevor and Emilio both had

to go off to Oviedo for the degree ceremony. There was no choice but to leave me alone for the last

day, and, well, as I have mentioned before, I’m not good at foreign places! They were careful that I

knew how to get a taxi, and where to eat, but, all the same, this was a frightening experience for me.

Of course it all worked out OK, but how people can actually enjoy this foreign travel business is

beyond me! Perhaps next time I shall have more confidence? Hmmm ...

Anyway, I survived, and felt quite superior on the train, drinking my wine bought on the ferry and

finishing the rather tasty sandwiches I’d made from the chicken left over from the party. What had

I achieved, though, in relation to my “mission”? I felt, and still feel, that I ought to be working

closely with these “SED” people. Our ideas have a great deal in common. Everyone thinks so –

except Trevor! Maybe he’s right. Our differences are ones of principle. He thinks mathematical

models are possible and useful in several areas in which I think reality is just too complicated. He

does not see a need for an aether. He does not see the need to look at a level below that of

electromagnetism as understood by James Clerk Maxwell in the nineteenth century. He thinks

Einstein’s relativity theories basically correct, including a phenomenon known as “Lorentz

Invariance” – that the laws of physics are exactly the same if you are moving at constant speed or

you are at rest, so that the fact that if you are below decks in a ship you can’t tell if it’s moving or

not is assumed to apply at all speeds, even those near that of light. (The fact that the ship would

have disintegrated long before this has never bothered the theoreticians!)

And what were Emilio’s views on all this? I was not sure. A few months later I nearly had a

chance to get better acquainted with him: there was to be a conference in Durham, and he was on

the list.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 33

8. My first conference

The 1995 conference and Selleri’s help, Peña and Cetto’s encouragement,

suggestions for funding from Percival

“A very serious situation has arisen. The general anti-rationalistic

atmosphere which has become a menace of our time, and which to combat is

the duty of every thinker who cares for the traditions of our civilization, has

led to a most serious deterioration of the standards of scientific discussion.

... It started with the brilliant young physicists who gloried in their mastery of

the tools and look down upon us amateurs who had to struggle to understand

what they were doing and saying. It became a menace when this attitude

hardened into a kind of professional etiquette.” Karl R Popper, “Quantum

Theory and the Schism in Physics”, W W Bartley, ed., Hutchinson & Co.,

London, 1982 [ from Franco Selleri, 4:2:98]

[29:9:00]

How to get the facts out to the world, that is the question! Right from the start, it has seemed that

what I needed was a manager, or public relations officer. For a shy and retiring person, my efforts

at publicity have been exciting – sometimes too exciting – but often an ordeal and, as I have said,

they have produced scarcely a ripple on the calm self-assurance of the establishment. I suppose the

problem has always been the incomprehensibility of the subject. No salesman is keen to take on a

job selling something he doesn’t understand. Or is it just that there would be no money in it?

After all, even if they don’t understand what I’ve done I’ve found that most people (other than

quantum theorists!) are perfectly willing to believe I’m right. Or is it that there are exceedingly few

people around who trust their own common sense quite enough to stand up against the “experts”,

and the few who do have got more sense than to devote their lives to a hopeless cause!

Be that as it may, my diary shows evidence that I worked phenomenally hard on publicity that

summer, as well as continuing my physics education. I was cutting down my paper (which was

transformed from “Explosion of a Quantum Myth” to “The Chaotic Ball”42), studying Aspect’s

thesis, writing to people, angling for invitations to visit them. The beginnings of disillusion were

setting in about the power of the written word. I don’t know how it is, but few people read and

understand. They read and decide whether or not they agree with the conclusion! A few years on

and this scepticism has become extended to the spoken word as well: people hear only what they

want to hear ...

Anyway, that summer I did manage (with Trevor’s help) a visit to Alastair Rae in Birmingham.

He’d written a book that had been mentioned in the original New Scientist newsletter that had set

me off on my trail. He did not seem very convinced by my latest ideas on timing. These had been

recently re-enforced by information from Aspect’s thesis – I felt that a diagram of one of his

“coincidence time spectra” and his description of how he decided what to accept as a coincidence

supported my idea that he was dealing with pulses of light extended over several nanoseconds. If

such is the case there will inevitably be a tendency for stronger signals to be detected relatively

early, and this can increase the apparent “quantum correlation”43. Alastair was not very excited,

either, by the fact that I thought a diagram in his book was a natural precursor to my Chaotic Ball.

Still, we had a pleasant little chat and it did help make me a bit more realistic: I’d been half hoping

42 Thompson, C H. "The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments", Found. Phys. Lett. 9, 357 (1996),

http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037

43 Thompson, C H, “Timing, "accidentals" and other artifacts in EPR experiments”, http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-

ph/9711044 (1997)

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that I could become his research assistant, but would I really have been happy? I’d have had to

work on things that interested him, and whatever he told me about these evidently made little

impression at the time. (I found out later that he is interested in “SQUIDs”, or Superconducting

Quantum Interference Devices, which are quite fascinating, but, to me, take lower precedence than

the fundamental matter of trying to restore local realism to its rightful place.)

A surprise spin-off from my brief correspondence with Costa de Beauregard came in the form of

some papers by David Chalmers (not, I hasten to say, any well-known holder of that name but an

obscure frustrated realist living in London) that he forwarded to me. They were about his EPR

model, which I do not imagine De Beauregard had found too strange after reading about mine –

David’s ideas about the validity of the Bell tests were not that different. He believed in photons,

though, which De Beauregard would not have found off-putting but which made me initially

skeptical. None the less, this introduction started a correspondence that continued until his death at

the end of 2001, and I gradually became accustomed to his special variant of the photon, which was

innocuous compared to Aspect’s. It was tiny, corresponding, if I’ve understood correctly, to one

single peak of a wave. He regarded its detailed description as a kind of trade secret, now – unless

maybe he passed it on to his son – lost to humanity.

David became my expert on what light actually does when confronted with a beamsplitter or

whatever. He had lasers and things in his back room and did experiments, some of the recent ones

showing clear problems with quantum theory44. He thought they also showed problems with

classical theory, but that, I think, depends which book you read.

Back in 1995 he kept me busy. I had to search around for a PC so as to try out a simulation

program his son had produced, based on my Chaotic Ball. (My own son has since improved it

slightly, correcting a minor error and using some pretty graphics. It really ought to be put on the

Internet, but the main benefit, it seems to me, is to the writer of the program. If only the quantum

theorists could do this kind of simulation – one in which time necessarily goes forwards and effect

follows cause in logical fashion – for themselves! The act of creating the program is very

instructive ...) I did hope that some day I would have met David – he lived, as I said, in London –

but this was not to be. Another thing we had in common was our travel phobia.

Peter Holland was another person I nearly got to meet. I had read an article of his in the Times

Higher Education magazine45, which was always lying around in the Computer Science coffee

lounge at Aberystwyth. He, along with Lucien Hardy and many others, is a follower of the “Bohm-

De Broglie” interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which particles are guided by “empty” waves.

I don’t think he said much about this in the article, though. What he said was that his theory

removed the mystification, and this sounded good. He writes very well, and I thought maybe here

was someone I could work with, especially as he was nearby, at Bristol. I sent him my paper, and,

while we were corresponding, I saw an advertisement for a bursary in what may have been his

department: they wanted a student to study physics, biology and quantum theory and investigate the

relationship between quantum theory and the genetic code. (I’d have summed it up in one word:

“Nil”, so perhaps I was not the ideal candidate!) I applied, and that may have rather confused the

issue, as I doubt if Peter was under any illusions about my attitude towards quantum theory. There

were various delays and we never did get to meet, and, of course, I did not get that bursary.

44 Chalmers, David, ???

45 Holland, Peter, “Peter Holland condemns the mystification of science by the popularisers”, Times Higher Education,

pp16-17, May 12, 1995

Caroline H Thompson

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Now that I know more about Holland’s theory – and have seen his book46 – I think I would have

had even more difficulty working with him than with Rae. The Bohm-De Broglie theory professes

to produce detailed trajectories of individual electrons, but I think that these exist only in the

software of their simulation programs and the imaginations of the programmers. Not all computer

simulations are good! The theory (Bohm’s own version anyway) assumes some very strange

things, including an explanation of the EPR correlations that depends on instantaneous influences at

a distance. No wonder Bohm – the only one of the early quantum theory experts known to have

passed any comment – was pleased by Aspect’s results.

Then, out of the blue, I received an invitation from Euan Squires to a conference in Durham. I was

invited to give a 25 minute talk, and the list of participants included Holland, Rae, Santos and even

my good friend Selleri. This was wonderful!

* * * * * * * *

[30:9:00]

It was beautiful in Durham that September. On my first visit I had seen only the modern part of the

university, never imagining the existence of the old town. There was perfect autumn weather, the

accommodation was in an ancient building steeped in history, just opposite the cathedral (the down-

side of which was, of course, the cathedral bells, with, one evening, a bell-ringing practice!) and

everyone was so friendly. As it turned out, Santos couldn’t make it and nor could Peter, but I had

no time to worry about that.

It was at this conference that I met a marvellous couple: Luis de la Peña and his wife, Ana Maria

Cetto, from Mexico. I must have been looking lost, coming into the cafeteria for my first meal.

Ana Maria started talking to me, and instantly I felt I had a friend. I confessed my terror at the

thought of giving my speech in front of all these learned people, and she – almost literally – held

my hand. She and Luis, it turned out, were experts in SED and had worked with Trevor Marshall

and Emilio Santos on some aspects of it. (They could have spoken Spanish with Emilio. Maria’s

English was excellent, but Luis had some difficulty.) They told me about the book they were about

to publish47, and about the problems of being a “realist”. (Later they sent me a copy, and from

time to time we have had other communications. They have been willing nominees as referees for

some of my papers.)

Then I went to register, and who should be there but Franco! I had not been quite sure he would

come. We’d had a little correspondence about it a while back, but Trevor had said ominously that

he made a habit of not turning up. He greeted me with an enthusiastic hug. Things were looking

up!

I cannot remember a great deal about the lectures, though I took detailed notes and tried very hard

to understand them. I remember more about the town, the walks with Franco, talking physics non-

stop and managing to get lost and having to ask our way back – amazing really, considering how

small the town is and the fact that from almost anywhere you can see the spire of the magnificent

cathedral! There were walks to the pub in the evenings, too, with young enthusiastic students, and

leisurely meals with yet more talking. There was a brilliant young man from Munich, then studying

at Imperial College, London. I was flattered that people like him should accept me as an equal. My

lack of formal physics training did not seem to matter at all.

46 Holland, Peter R, “The Quantum Theory of Motion: an account of the de Broglie-Bohm causal interpretation of

quantum mechanics”, Cambridge University Press 1993

47 Peña, Luis de la and Ana Maria Cetto, “The quantum dice: an introduction to stochastic electrodynamics”, Kluwer

1996

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There was another bright young man from Greece who seemed fascinated by my ideas, but, looking

back, I do just wonder if it wasn’t partly that he had been starved of female company! It was, of

course, an almost exclusively male world that I had ventured into. I don’t think there were any

other female speakers, unless, maybe, Ana Maria spoke. I can’t remember. Anyway, I’m afraid my

young admirer seems to have been typical of students who have the misfortune to do PhD’s in

fundamental physics these days. By the next time I met him he had evidently become absorbed into

“Hilbert Space” and lost to my world

Hilbert Space is the “infinite-dimensional” space in which the dreaded “wave functions” reside.

Mathematicians thrive there but I fear that ordinary mortals enter at their peril! The currently-

accepted attitude is well illustrated in a book I read recently. It was by Luis de Broglie48, a

Founding Father with some quite reasonable ideas on waves, though at the time of writing this book

(which came out in French in 1937) showing evidence of confusion trying to reconcile them with

particles. He stated the belief that “the Theory of Relativity has been a marvellous exercise in

overcoming mental rigidity”. All too often one hears the same kind of thing: study of the exotic

modern theories, whether logical or otherwise, increases mental flexibility, freeing us from

preconceptions. From the evidence I have seen, studying the incomprehensible does harm, not

good, to the brain and – as you may by now have realised – I have never found myself confronted

by a single fact that has compelled me to relinquish my native “mental rigidity”. I have hung on to

my common sense and intuition.

To return to my story: I met my Greek student again a few years later, at another conference. We

had both been pleased to see each other’s names on the list, but we could no longer get on the same

wavelength. He, it seems, had spent all the intervening years continuing development of the

“logical” arguments related to the EPR problem on which he talked in Durham. He had moved

entirely into a fantasy world in which the real experiments seemed to play no part.

Now I really ought not to dismiss all the Durham talks without comment! It was here that I began

to learn about Bohm-De Broglie theory. Many people there backed it, including Lucien Hardy

(who, you may remember, I had first met earlier that year), Squires himself, and even Franco

Selleri. It is not good enough, though! It may seem like an improvement on the standard

“Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum theory, in that it does not need complex numbers, but all it

does is meekly copy Schrödinger’s equation, instead of going back to the real world for new

inspiration. There might be a few good features, but it seems to have as much trouble with the

“measurement problem” – the infamous “collapse of the wave function” – as ever, and the

explanation for the EPR correlations presented by Squires just did not make sense. I think it was

after his talk that I broke a rule of a lifetime: I actually asked a question! Throughout my school

career, and even on into my time as a statistician, I had always avoided this, finding it just too

nerve-wracking – just about as bad, in fact, as giving a speech. Anyway, I couldn’t let them carry

on under a delusion, so I spoke out. It was a point rather than a question. I chipped in to say that

when people had heard my own talk and realised that the experiments did not show non-local

effects they might change their minds. Enough people there had already heard of my ideas for this

to be taken in good heart. I’d persuaded the secretaries to run off copies of some of my papers and

given them to all and sundry.

Another thing I persuaded these hard-working secretaries to do was type out a letter. I’d brought

along my Chaotic Ball paper in a state that Franco and I thought fit for publishing, and now I had to

approach a journal. Franco and I got our heads together one morning before the lectures (causing

embarrassment to another early arrival, who thought they were intruding on something of a more

intimate nature!) and drafted a supporting letter to Professor Van der Merwe, editor of Foundations

48 De Broglie, Luis, “Matter and Light”, W H Johnston (translator), George Allen & Unwin, London 1939

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 37

of Physics Letters and a good friend of his. I was now, I thought, on the track that led out to the

wide world. (Several years on it does not seem that anyone has actually read it! I have never seen

it cited except by Franco.)

Then came my own talk! I was too nervous to even hear the two preceding ones. There was quite

a big audience – about 50 people, filling the lecture room. Still, I took a deep breath and off I went.

As in Bari, after the first sentence I was away, enjoying myself. They listened, seeming to take it

in, interrupting only to prompt me to bring in a salient point, and gave me almost a standing ovation

at the end.

There was a break next, an opportunity for much talking. One person in particular I met for the first

time then – Marek Zukowski, a charming Pole from Gdansk. I’d read one of his papers49 – in fact,

I’d had to send off specially for it on Inter-Library Loan. The paper presented a generalised Bell

test, and had been quoted by John Rarity, but I had read it and discovered that it was purely

theoretical and specifically stated that it applied only in perfect conditions! I thought it was

illogical, or even unethical, for John, with his far-from-perfect experiment, to rely on it, and said so

to Marek. Here was another puzzle for me, though. Marek just did not seem concerned. He is such

a nice person, yet he did not seem to react at all as I would have done if my own ideas had been

misused like that ...

There was another small point that emerged in conversation after my talk. It seemed that Lucien

Hardy had spent some time in the laboratory of a certain Anton Zeilinger, in Innsbruck. (I had

forgotten the name, but in fact he’d been on Pascazio’s list and I’d written to him way back in

February, which may possibly account for something that happened later ...) There seems to be

something funny about that lab! People who emerge from it are never the same again. Have they

perhaps lingered too long in the noisome fumes of “Hilbert Space”? For Marek too has an

Innsbruck connection: he has collaborated with Zeilinger on many papers, working mostly in

Gdansk but with some spells in Austria.

But of course this is really part of a much more general picture, in which incomprehensible theories

mean that new initiates must renounce their right to original thought, following instead the

directives of the “high priests”. They must also present a united front against the ignorant masses

of the outside world, never disclosing the secrets of the various miracles or even discussing them

openly with each other. The tradition of politeness and restraint in professional communications

enables them to do this with dignity and all the appearance of sincerity. In my opinion (and saying

this in public has got me into trouble on occasion!) their professional lives are not sincere, much of

what they paid to do as scientists not science, yet as people they are just like anyone else.

I have met both Lucien and Marek at several conferences now, and though I think Lucien would be

the first to admit that we have little in common, he has helped me on occasion. For example after

this present conference he sent me a copy of one of his papers that seemed to support one of my

own beliefs50 – the existence of “preferred frames” which means the failure of “Lorentz

Invariance”. Marek, as I said, is quite charming, eager to exchange ideas life in general, politics or

economics – his country was happily converting to a market economy at the time. He tried to help

me to find out practical experimental details (on which he admitted he was weak) by introducing

me to his colleague, Harald Weinfurter, in the Innsbruck lab. They, and all the other members of

49 Zukowski, Marek, “Bell theorem involving all settings of measuring apparatus”, Physics Letters A, 177, 290-296,

1993

50 Hardy, Lucien, “Quantum mechanics, local realistic theories, and Lorentz-invariant realistic theories”, Physical

Review Letters 68, 2981-4, 1992

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the establishment once they get to know me, are just a little bit careful what they say to me about

physics, though! They know I am not bound by their rules.

So the Durham conference was over, and I was sad. There was a last expedition with Franco,

wandering in the cathedral looking for the tomb of Saint Cuthbert and in bookshops in the old town

searching for a present for his young daughter, then I was on my way home. I felt I had made my

point and made friends – even, possibly, made progress towards getting paid for my efforts. (Ian

Percival had suggested I might apply to the “Leverhulme Trust”, but more of this later.) My vocal

chords would not be getting such good exercise again for another year. Or would they? I had

forgotten the great “induced coherence” affair, with many vociferous and heated debates with

Trevor, some in Manchester and others in Deiniolen.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 39

9. The Induced Coherence Affair

Trevor Marshall and I have words!

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble

reasoning of a single individual.” - Galileo Galilei

Homecoming was traumatic: my son Daniel had just started his ‘A’ levels at school, and had

already discovered that he was not cut out for pure mathematics. I’d been away just when I’d been

needed, and now I was back I was not a great deal of help. I just didn’t know what to do. If it had

been myself having problems of this nature, I’d have been utterly miserable, and I got the

impression my Daniel was not that much different. Up till now he had drifted through life without

a care in the world. Now he was worried, and there was no obvious way forward. Chloe had done

really well at that school, winning prizes for essays in Welsh and generally doing all the right

things. Daniel had found it uninspiring. Drastic measures seemed needed: after some months of

indecision he switched schools and subjects, exchanging mathematics, physics and chemistry for

psychology, sociology and philosophy – which was just as bad in its way but at least he learned to

write! It was a shame about the chemistry, too. I had felt that he had a feel for it.

It was during this period of upheaval that I travelled on the “Traws” bus with him and Max Wallis

to Deiniolen, where we joined Trevor. We thought the break would do him good! I don’t know

that I was under any illusion about what I was in for, though. I had been having grave professional

disagreements with my friend Trevor, and it did not help that he did not consider my opinion of any

value as he did not consider that I had any “theory”! This may be true, but nonetheless I think I

have good reason to challenge his application of his theory to the case of “induced coherence”51.

I’d better try and explain. Let’s start with the diagram:

Fig. 4: An “induced coherence” experiment (from Zou, Wang and Mandel, Physical

Review Letters 67, 318 (1991))

A laser beam is split and part goes to one “nonlinear crystal” and part to another. The (split)

laser beams are said to act as “pumps” for the crystals, triggering outputs by a process

known as “parametric down conversion” (PDC). Each crystal has two outputs, quantum

theory and Trevor’s agreeing that these will be of lower frequency than the pump, the sum

of the frequencies being equal to the frequency of the input. (This may be true, but the

actual experiments always deal with what is known as the “degenerate case”, in which the

51 Zou, X Y, L J Wang and L Mandel, “Induced coherence and indistinguishability in optical interference”, Physical

Review Letters 67, 318 (1991)

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two frequencies are identical, each being half that of the input. From the point of view of

my argument, this is important. It means that we don’t need such a complicated theory.)

Now, the two outputs are conventionally labeled “signal” and “idler”. If you take the signal

outputs from each crystal and try and make them interfere (that is what the second

beamsplitter does), you find that they don’t. The beams are “incoherent”. But if you take

the “idler” output from the first crystal and use it as another input to the second crystal, low

and behold, the “signal” outputs are found to have become “coherent”. They now interfere,

which can be demonstrated by showing that the counts at the detector vary in a sinusoidal

manner as you move the beamsplitter sideways by tiny steps, so that you vary the path

length difference between the two “signals”.

This is extremely clever, and neither quantum theory nor Trevor’s SED says it is easy to

explain. Quantum theory says it is something to do with the indistiguishability of two paths,

for it is believed that there is only one “photon” emerging from the first beamsplitter. The

effect is pure magic as no real “interference” can possibly be taking place (and they admit it!

See that article in Physics World that I mentioned in the introduction.) In their theory, you

get at any one instant either a “signal” from crystal 1 or one from crystal 2. The effect

depends, they say, on the fact that if you put another detector in, to measure the “idler”

output from crystal 2, you can tell whether the pair of lower-energy photons was produced

in the first or the second crystal. In other words the paths are distinguishable. Unless, that

is, you put in a link. Then you don’t know what is happening, as maybe the photon went

down the link and then on to the second beamsplitter. (Hang on! Haven’t we forgotten that

in general they could be different wavelengths? Never mind, we’ll press on.) Anyway, the

story goes that we have now made our two paths indistinguishable and therefore we expect

to find interference. (Sorry, I didn’t invent this story!)

Under Trevor’s theory, you can calculate everything using ordinary ideas about classical

waves and polarisability of the medium of the crystals, and you find that everything depends

on the square of the polarisability and the result just falls out after a little algebra. (Sorry

again! I may not have done this justice. Some years later he posted the details in the Los

Alamos archive where you can check them for yourself52.)

But the tricky bit is this: under both quantum theory and Trevor’s, if you were to insert a

“phase-shifter” in the linking beam this would add that amount of extra “phase” to the

outputs from crystal 2 and this would show up as an appropriate shift in the position of the

interference fringes.

I thought this unlikely. I don’t remember where the idea came from, but once I’d got it, it

seemed just so right I could not let it go – and I still can’t. I looked hard at the report of the

actual experiment and observed that they had not actually tested this matter, so I felt no

compulsion to believe it happened.

All they had actually tested was that if you gradually change the intensity, not the phase, of

the linking beam (by inserting a filter to absorb some of the energy) you find that your

interference pattern gradually changes in “visibility”. Now why should this be? Well, as I

said, I had come up with an idea. It is simplest to assume (and this almost certainly matches

the real conditions) that the two outputs from each crystal are at frequencies exactly half that

of the input. So here comes our pump signal, our input, and it has too many peaks to be

exactly related in phase to the outputs. It has exactly twice as many peaks per second as

52 Marshall, T W details of SED explanation of induced coherence, quant-ph ??????????????????

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 41

needed. So maybe alternate peaks of the wave are somehow tied to signal and idler peaks?

Why not? If this is so, then there will be a phase relationship here, but it will be ambiguous:

the signal can either be tied to “even” or to “odd” peaks of the input.

Once you’ve got that far, the rest is obvious: what the linking beam does is just tip the

balance of probabilities, forcing the second crystal into producing the same choice (even or

odd) as the first. Of course, even and odd are arbitrary really: what I mean is that the link

makes sure that a consistent choice is made. If you weaken the link you will make it less

certain that the second crystal will make this choice, so you will revert to the normal case of

randomness and hence “incoherence”. For what I suspect you are seeing in the normal,

unlinked, case, is the result of two interference patterns that wash each other out because

they are 180 ̊ out of phase.

Trevor considers it a weakness of my idea (so he has listened, just a little!) that I am unable

to say what I think will happen if you do insert a phase-shifter in the link. Probably nothing,

or maybe the visibility of the interference pattern would oscillate, or maybe there would be

shifts but of unpredictable direction. The way I see it is that the intensity of the link is

known to be enormously less (a million times?) than the “pump” laser. Therefore it is the

pump that is in control, determining the phase of the output, though, as I’ve said, it can’t

determine it completely as it is twice the frequency. I see the linking beam as providing just

a little tweak, helping the system to decide between the two possibilities. There is more that

I’d like to know, though. Can I be sure that the link is simply of lower intensity all the time,

or might the light be coming in pulses, as quantum optics would have us believe?

Individual pulses might then be just as strong as the pump. I suspect that what really

happens is a compromise, but in the present climate nobody seems interested in doing a full

investigation.

We had been “discussing” this for the past few weeks, i.e. I had been telling Trevor what I thought

and he had been re-iterating that his theory predicted the correct result, but he had not been giving

me the full story. His idea of the purpose of the North Wales trip was to deliver the appropriate

lecture (jointly to myself and Max) so that we would know how to describe the process to others.

As you will understand, my idea was somewhat different.

This lecture gave a rather sour taste to our mini holiday – that and Trevor’s health and Dan’s school

problems and a slight matter of overcrowding in the tiny cottage (four people and Trevor’s dog,

Fred. Just as well his daughter’s dog was still in Spain at the time!). Max seemed to think that

climbing a mountain was a cure for all ills, but I fear that Dan did not agree. Trevor was not very

well and sat in the car shivering, but that was surely no excuse for refusing to let me even try and

explain “my theory”?

A change is as good as a rest, they say, but the journey home was a disaster too: we tried to catch a

bus that didn’t exist, and were lucky to get home that day.

* * * * * * * *

[4:10:00]

Back home, I continued to feel both hurt and livid! How could any “scientist” behave like that? I

suppose the truth is that he had “done the maths” and it “worked” so he was absolutely certain it

was right. Why should he waste mental energy exploring other possibilities? I expect he had

persuaded Emilio he was right, and had no real need to persuade me too.

But I was not going to let the matter rest. I wrote to Leonard Mandel, one of the authors of the

“induced coherence” paper, asking if he knew of any experimental evidence for this disputed phase

shift. He sent me a few references. I don’t think he pretended they were conclusive – he merely

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said that he personally believed the shift would happen. I looked them up, and they were

fascinating but definitely did not establish the fact. They set me off on all sorts of other quests,

including one with a beautiful name, the Pancharatnam Phase Shift53, and I had much

correspondence with my friend David Chalmers on this and other matters.

Mandel did not respond when I told him what I’d found and asked more questions. Grayson, the

author of the interesting Pancharatnam article, did not respond either. Eventually I wrote also to

Paul Kwiat (now quite well-known for his work on faster-than-light signals and interaction free

measurements54). He had written a paper with Raymond Chiao55 that was vaguely related to the

phase shift problem. It happened to include a graph that I was sure was wrongly labelled, making it

impossible for anyone to attempt any different interpretation, so I wrote mainly about this. Paul did

respond, and from time to time we have exchanged messages, but I had come once again on that

curious lack of real commitment: he had published the paper and did not seem all that concerned

that it might have contained an error. He admitted I was probably right, but the data had now been

lost!

There were a couple of other fascinating features in that paper of Kwiat and Chiao’s. For one thing,

they hinted that they suspected something that I had been beginning to suspect, not necessarily in

relation to the experiment I’d started from but something that I think could be very important in all

sorts of other experiments. They evidently suspected that the “photons” they were seeing might be

coming in a random stream, each of slightly different frequency. What they said was that this could

not be so, but why mention it at all? Their argument was obscure, to say the least! They thought

they had infringed a Bell test, and that this proved that they had nonlocal effects and hence that

their photons couldn’t possess anything as definite as a frequency! “Frequency” is supposed to be

another of those mysterious quantum properties that do not exist until measured.

And just what made them think they’d infringed a Bell test that counted? It was partly to do with

the fact that they had a beamsplitter that did not seem to be splitting its beam as it ought to. If

classical theory was correct, the argument goes, then the beamsplitter would have split all inputs in

half. This would have led to more coincidences than they actually observed. But by the time I read

this paper I was quite certain that classical theories did not have this constraint! I had, after all,

absorbed quite a lot of Trevor’s ideas! I had absorbed the idea that there are extra inputs to every

beamsplitter, inputs from the “vacuum”, not noticed at high intensities but at low ones sometimes

important, causing the split to be uneven. I had also, on his direction, read an important paper by

Grangier, Roger and Aspect56. Trevor and Emilio had disputed it the next year57. They explained

how their theory could account for the low number of coincidences (i.e. lower number of

simultaneous detections from the two outputs than expected.)

Though I have since had other ideas about just how this works, I was quite certain Kwiat and

Chiao’s arguments were invalid in more than one way. This seemed really exciting to me, but

could I get anyone else interested? No!

53 Grayson, T P, J R Torgerson and G A Barbosa, “Observation of a nonlocal Pancharatnam phase shift in the process of

induced coherence without induced emission”, Physical Review A, 49, 626 (1994)

54 Kwiat, Paul G et al, “Experimental Realization of Interaction-free Measurements”, Annals of the New York

Academy of Sciences 755, 383-393 (1995); " Interaction-free Measurement", Physical Review Letters 74, 4763 (1995)

55 Kwiat, P G and R Y Chiao, “Observation of a nonclassical Berry's phase for the photon”, Physical Review Letters

66, 588 (1991)

56 Grangier, P, G Roger and A Aspect, “Experimental Evidence for a photon anticorrelation effect on a beam splitter: a

new light on single-photon interferences”, Europhysics Letters 1, 173-179(1986)

57 Marshall, T W and Santos, E, Europhysics Letters, 3, 293-6 (1987)

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 43

The quarrel with Trevor over that wretched phase shift dragged on, and he refused also to consider

my idea about the succession of pulses of precise frequency. It has still not been resolved, though

we remain friends (of a kind!). I have written little documents for him, and for a long time

refrained from discussing my idea with Emilio. When eventually, after checking with Trevor, I sent

him something on the subject, he did not comment.

It was not until last year that I put any of this in the archive58, and then it was not directly on the

“induced coherence” issue but the matter of these exact frequencies. I think they could be the secret

to, among other things, some experiments supposed to be improvements on Aspect’s work in

Innsbruck59 and some that gained much publicity a few years ago, when a team in Geneva declared

that they had produced violations of Bell tests with their photons separated by several kilometers60.

But I propose to take a break from my history at this point for a while and tell you something about

my picture of “life, the universe, and everything”.

58 Thompson, C H, “Rotational invariance, phase relationships and the quantum entanglement illusion”,

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9912082 (1999)

59 Weihs, Gregor et al., “Violation of Bell’s inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions”, Physical Review

Letters 81, 5039 (1998) and quant-ph/9810080

60 Tittel, W, J Brendel, B Gisin, T Herzog and N Gisin, “Experimental demonstration of quantum-correlations over

more than 10 kilometers”, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9707042, revised and published as Physical Review A 57,

3229 (1998)

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10. Interlude: The Aether and a Complete New Physics

It is not only QT has lost touch with reality! Those Michelson-Morley

experiments have been misreported: they do not rule out an aether. Possibly

they do rule out the particular kind of aether that was in vogue at the time.

Abolish the idea of the particle-photon and a complete new explanation of all

the forces becomes possible.

"I personally feel it is presumptuous to believe that man can determine the

whole temporal structure of the universe, its evolution, development and

ultimate fate from the first nanosecond of creation to the last 10^10 years, on

the basis of three or four facts which are not very accurately known and are

disputed among the experts." J. Bahcall, senior astrophysicist, Institute for

Advanced Study

About the first words that Trevor Marshall said to me when we met face to face were that he did not

see a need for an aether and was not interested in cosmology, which was somewhat frustrating! I

am not especially interested in cosmology, but the aether is an essential. They were absolutely right

in the nineteenth century, in my opinion. Light must be pure wave – I’ll explain more of my

reasons later – and a wave must have a medium in which to propagate.

But it appears that something scandalous has been going on! At the time (1995) I knew only a little

of the story. What I had been told was the standard tale, that the experiments by Michelson and

Morley towards the end of the nineteenth century, designed to detect whether or not the Earth was

moving through an aether, had given “null” results. Suppose there is a fixed aether occupying an

“absolute space” and the Earth is moving through it in its journey around the Sun. Then the aether

should be causing a “wind” that will make light go sometimes faster, sometimes slower, relative to

us.

The expected effect is not at all easy to test for. Light goes too fast and photomulipliers and atomic

clocks had not even been invented, so they couldn’t just send out a pulse from A and detect at B

and measure the time and distance. Possibly modern technology would make such direct tests

feasible, but even today everyone seems to rely on methods in which the light goes from A to B and

back. The situation is exactly analogous to rowing a boat a fixed distance on a return journey that

is either up and down stream or across the river and back. The difference between the times taken

turns out to depend on the square of the ratio of the speed of flow to your rowing speed. If you are

rowing at the speed of light, well, the straight ratio would be small enough but its square – even

with the water flowing at 30 km/sec – they were brave even to think of it! There’s a trick you can

use, though. You don’t try and measure the time difference directly. You are dealing with light,

not boats and water, and you make use of the wave nature of light by making the return beam

interfere with the outgoing one (See diagram).

[fig: basic Michelson-Morley scheme]

You can calculate the expected way in which the fringe positions should change as you rotate the

apparatus from its “up and down stream” to its “across stream” positions and back, then compare

with observation. (This took some patience! The experimenter had to walk round in a circle,

following the slowly-revolving apparatus, keeping his eye fixed on one particular peak of the

pattern and recording what he saw every time he heard a prompting “ping”.) Michelson and

Morley and various others tried hard to spot fringe shifts and, we are told, found nothing. There

was no sign that a light signal sent in the direction of the supposed wind went at a different speed

from one that went across it.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 45

This is what we have been told. There is no sign of aether wind, so maybe the aether doesn’t exist,

or maybe other things are happening – the famous “Lorentz-Fitzgerald contractions” in all lengths –

that make our indirect method of testing ineffective. But what I had always thought was this: What

if the aether were being dragged with the Earth, just as flowing water in a river goes slower near the

bottom? I later found out that others at the time had had this idea, but that it had not seemed

possible. Could they have dismissed it for a false reason, though? They had thought about light

and the fact that it can be “polarized”, and decided that this proved it was a transverse wave and so

must behave like other kinds of transverse wave – like surface waves on water, or transverse

seismic waves. The only kind of transverse wave you can get in a fluid, though, is a surface one,

which is two-dimensional. If you want three-dimensional ones, spreading in all directions

throughout the body of the medium, you need an elastic solid. Hence, they reasoned, the aether was

an elastic solid, if it existed at all. Moreover, in order to carry light at enormous speeds, it had to

be a very stiff solid.

I don’t know when I started to have this idea. Perhaps it originated in this need to explain the null

result, which meant you had to have aether drag and hence had to have a fluid aether, or maybe it

came from puzzling about the nature of magnetism and the need to explain lines of force that did

not point directly towards their presumed cause, but somehow I had come to the idea that light and

other radiation might really consist of longitudinal waves. I thought about the geometry of the

situation, and came to the idea that if we had longitudinal waves and they propagated in a very neat

way, they could carry transverse patterns. This might be what polarization really was!

At some point in my studies, I had read Maxwell’s own account of how electromagnetic waves

propagate61. I thought he could have been making life too complicated. Gradually, since about this

time, I have been finding out more and more, and coming to the idea that Maxwell would have been

basing the whole of his theory on the results of laboratory experiments. He had ideas about

magnetism and electrostatic forces that were obtained entirely from experiments on a macroscopic

scale. His inspiration that light was an “electromagnetic wave” was one of the greatest

breakthroughs in the history of science, yet his picture of electric and magnetic influences somehow

crawling over each other could be misleading. Nothing that he would have seen would have told

him that maybe he was in fact dealing with violently fluctuating systems, and that even electrostatic

forces were the result of travelling waves. This kind of picture of the fine-scale nature of things

did not become fashionable till the next century and the discovery of “quantum” particles – the

electron and proton and later, the neutron – and “quantum fluctuations”, filling what he would have

taken to be pure empty space!

Now, I have no need for quantum theory’s mysteries and Hilbert spaces etc., but I have got a use

for all these fluctuations! This, incidentally, is the big uniting force between myself and Trevor: to

outsiders it may seem that we are talking about exactly the same thing. In SED, the vacuum is full

of waves – electromagnetic noise – even at absolute zero temperature, and these play important

roles in holding atoms together and, indeed, in every event on very small scales. The difference

between SED and my own ideas is merely that I feel that things would be easier to understand if we

tried to see what the electromagnetic waves must really look like on a scale smaller than their

wavelengths. To do this, we must face up to the fact that they are real waves in a real medium, and

we can’t hope to solve the final mysteries till we find out a bit more about this medium.

But I promised to tell you of a scandal! It is likely that you will have been told that the aether is an

outdated concept and has been dead since Einstein abolished it in 1905 with his famous paper

introducing his Special Relativity (the part everyone quotes is reproduced in A P French’s

61 Whittaker, Sir Edmund, “A History of the theories of aether and electricity”, Nelson, London, 1951

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admirable “Centenary Volume”62). Einstein has always maintained that the Michelson-Morley null

results were not essential and he would have had the idea anyway. Be this as it may, it is certain

that his followers thought otherwise. They saw it as crucial to Einstein’s theory that there should be

no sign of “aether drift”.

But there was! Right from the start, there were periodic trends that they could not understand. For

one thing, there were daily patterns, interpreted as showing the Sagnac effect (light does go at

different speeds East to West and West to East), and there were also some other very interesting

subtle variations. The only thing “null” about the results was that the was no sign of the large

effect they had expected, due to the motion around the Sun. I did not get to hear about all this fun

and games till a conference in Oxford in 1996, and did not see the evidence with my own eyes till a

few years after (October, 2000), so it is scarcely surprising if you, dear reader, have encountered a

slightly distorted version of the truth!

It seems that various people found those subtle variations interesting. What could they be?

Something to do with temperature variations? Something to do with interactions with the Earth’s

magnetic field? They were small – too small to be the effect they had been looking for originally –

and also came at the wrong places! When the experiments were repeated, they moved. Most

people evidently thought that they must, therefore, be just some kind of artifact, but Dayton Miller

thought otherwise. Over the course of the years, he and colleagues conducted a great number of

very careful trials.

As I said, I only found out this part of the story later. I have now read Miller’s excellent though

somewhat tedious account of his work in a review paper of 193363. I was spurred on to do this,

having had the paper in my possession ever since the Storrs NPA conference in June, by an email

that invited me to put a new link in my web site. James DeMeo had written a paper evaluating a

paper written in 1955 by Shankland et al. that poured scorn on Miller’s work.

DeMeo’s paper can be found on the internet at http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm64.

Shankland’s paper is very very seriously biased. It was written, he says, in consultation with

Einstein, but I suspect that it was not Einstein who selected the “facts”. Shankland selected data

from various experiments that Miller had not, for one reason or another, included in his 1933 paper.

He had, one must presume (and remember, that 1933 paper comes over as totally honest,

impeccable, science) rejected this data because it had known sources of bias, or was from early

“calibration” runs. Basically, what Shankland came up with was the old chestnut, that the

variations were all temperature effects, ignoring the vast amount of evidence that Miller had

accumulated that showed they were not!

So much for Shankland. Let’s return to Miller, whose work was much more interesting! Now

Miller investigated all sorts of things. He tried the experiment up mountains and in basements. He

tried it in buildings with solid walls, then found he got more interesting results with flimsy, canvas,

walls or just thin glass. If he was seeing aether drift, then evidently it was quite easily blocked, and

it was greater up in exposed mountains. The changes in position of the patterns gradually took on a

pattern of their own. He had to do more experiments, spread over more times of year, to pin this

down. What finally emerged from his 1925-6 work was a result that modern astronomers must

surely be interested in: that the Earth was moving even faster (208 km/sec was his estimate) in a

62 French, A P, “Einstein: A Centenary Volume”, Heinemann 1979

63 Miller, Dayton C, “The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth”,

Reviews of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933)

64 DeMeo, James, “Critical Review of the Shankland et al Analysis of Dayton Miller’s Aether-Drift Experiments”,

http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm, 2000

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 47

direction perpendicular to the plane of its motion around the Sun than it was moving in that plane.

Presumably the whole Solar System was in motion relative to a larger region.

Isn’t this what is thought these days, based on quite different evidence? Red and blue shifts in the

background cosmological microwave radiation seem indications of large Doppler effects,

corresponding, I believe, to a figure of 400 km/sec or thereabouts. Miller’s figure for effective

aether wind speed at the top of Mount Wilson had a maximum of only about 10 km/sec, but one has

to presume that even there he would have been sheltered from the main blast. My present idea is

that we are enclosed by wind-breaks: the whole Solar System is enclosed in its heliopause, then the

Earth is surrounded by its magnetosphere. The wind could be drastically reduced in stages, as well

as more gradually as it gets near the surface of the Earth.

Alternatively – and I rather like this idea, held by DeMeo – the Solar system may be caught up in a

gigantic flow of aether that is moving at several hundred km/sec, carried along with it like a leaf on

a river, but getting left behind a little so that the relative speed is a mere 10 km/sec. And, there is

more. This is a fascinating area, the subject of current controversy among dissidents, though little

of this reaches the media. It has a bearing on how gravity really works, but I shall leave that to

another chapter. Incidentally, not everyone, even if they believe in an aether, accepts DeMeo’s

interpretation of Miller’s results. They are inconvenient to others besides Einstein.

* * * * * * * *

[7:10:00]

So just why was the aether idea rejected after the Michelson-Morley apparently null result? They

were expecting it to be different, that’s all! They were looking for an aether that was fixed,

coinciding with the geometrical concept of “absolute space”, and this does not happen to be the way

Nature works. They couldn’t understand it. The kind of aether they had in mind simply couldn’t

have produced the results they were in fact seeing. How could it show those East-West variations

due to our daily spin and not the much larger ones due to our motion around the Sun? (Actually,

they would not have distinguished easily between East-West and North-South patterns: it would be

interesting to check more carefully.) Einstein declared that his Special Relativity rendered the

concept redundant, so the scientific community breathed a sigh of relief and decided it was best to

agree with him and banish the whole idea.

But if the aether behaves as Miller’s work seems to show, then the whole justification for Einstein’s

theories falls flat65! There is no point in developing Einstein-style theories until we’ve got to grips

with the behaviour of the aether rather better. Yes, I know Einstein’s formulae give a lot of right

answers, but that is not enough to make them worth the problems they introduce. How many of us

can really cope with a system in which time itself can be different for different people? Special

Relativity really has very few applications – just some obscure arguments about the lifetime of

muons and other arguments about the way particle accelerators work. General relativity is

supported by only the most meagre of evidence – facts about the bending of light around the sun

and changes in the perihelion of Mercury, facts that can certainly be explained by methods that

assume different behaviour of the aether rather than his famous “warping of space”. (I found out

only recently that a certain Paul Gerber had come up with exactly the same formulae as Einstein for

those changes in Mercury’s orbit and published them in 1898 in the same journal Einstein used for

his General Theory in 1915! Apparently the formulae are pretty inevitable, once you know the

answer you are trying to “predict” – which they did. There is some doubt as to whether Gerber’s

65 As Einstein himself said in the "Science" review in 1925: “... if Dr Miller's observations were confirmed, the Theory

of Relativity would be at fault. Experience is the ultimate judge.”

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physics was right, but this does prove there were other contenders. The formulae may be right but,

in the view of many dissidents, most likely both Gerber and Einstein got the physics wrong66,67.)

So, much as I respect Einstein as a person and for some of his work, I propose to reject outright all

his relativity ideas, replacing them by the simple statement that we don’t know how the aether

behaves in sufficient detail to model these matters. Before we move on to more positive thoughts,

though, we have to clear a bit more of the air. We have to look at the evidence for his “light

quanta”, or “photons” – the raison d’être for the whole edifice of quantum theory.

* * * * * * * *

I suppose before I started this EPR work, I must have had an open mind about photons, but it is

hard now to remember this. Photons don’t work in EPR experiments; they don’t work in polarisers;

they don’t work explaining any interference or diffraction effect; they are hopeless as carriers of

forces in the way Richard Feynman imagined! The only way to cope with their existence is to

accept Niels Bohr’s instructions to use “double-think”: sometimes light is photons and sometimes

waves. Quantum theory has not been able to make this double system really work, though. In

order to actually use the formulae, you find that you suddenly abolish real light waves and replace

them by “probability waves”! Sorry, but these are physically nonsense. Even the inventor of the

laser, Willis Lamb, thought so68.

So I ask again: what made Einstein think light came in photons?

Two phenomena need to be explained: the shape of the so-called “black body spectrum” and the

“photoelectric effect” (oh, and some people add the “Compton effect”, but this came after he had

invented the concept, and is used as verification).

I shall not go into any details on black bodies. Suffice it to say that, if you make certain

assumptions in addition to some basic ideas of classical wave theory, you land up with the

prediction that if you heat a body the amount of high frequency light produced will tend to infinity

– you get an “ultraviolet catastrophe”. This does not happen, so they (Max Planck in particular)

argue that classical theory must be wrong. It pretty certainly is wrong here and there – no theory is

perfect – but that does not necessarily mean that Planck had correctly diagnosed the situation. It

seems to me more likely that the community had allowed other artificial assumptions to creep into

their supposed “classical prediction”. (I am not the only one to think this: see a paper on Trevor

Marshall’s web site, written quite independently at about the same time I was writing the first draft

of this chapter. The paper is largely about philosophy, but happens to be illustrated by a

description of how Boltzmann modelled gases, an idea taken over by Planck in his model of heat in

solids69.)

Well, in 1900 Max Planck published a paper that was supposed to explain the observed behaviour

of black bodies. Was what he had done the only possible thing to do, though? He had landed up

with what was, from a classical point of view, a most unnatural idea – that the body could only

send out radiation in “quantised” little packets! It was absurd. It ran totally against a vast and very

successful body of ideas based around the work of Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz all the others,

culminating with Hertz’ discovery of radio waves, which had led to the idea that there was

66 G. E. Taubner (ed.), Albert Einstin’s Theory of General Relativity, (Crown Publishers, NY, 1979)

67 Beckmann, Petr, Einstein Plus Two, (Golem Press, 1987)

68 Lamb, W E, “Antiphoton”, Applied Physics B, 60, 77-84 (1995)

69 Marshall, T W, “Popper and Quantum Mechanics”, http://www.keyinnov.demon.co.uk/parmen.htm

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 49

continuous emission of radiation by moving electrons70. Planck did not replace this picture with

any alternative: radiation just happened, with no clue as to the mechanism or what it really was.

Yet eventually he got a Nobel Prize for it, and, in my view, set the scene for the downward spiral of

fundamental physics for the next century.

As Max said in his 1919 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The Origin and Development of the

Quantum Theory”:

But even if the radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be

only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather

unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving

it a real physical meaning ...

The way I see it, it is clear he had not found the “real physical meaning”, and some other

explanation must be possible – indeed, I think Trevor has one – or if a satisfactory explanation can’t

be found, why not leave the matter open? Planck himself was happy in a way to have “solved” his

problem but remained uneasy about the idea of quantised light. A recent (October, 2000) article

published in the quantum physics archive bears the title “".. I didn't reflect much on what I was

doing.." How Planck discovered his radiation formula”71. Unfortunately it is in German, or I

would undoubtedly read it.

What is it that we are trying to explain? Just a formula, describing a family of curves. They fit the

observed distributions of energies, and are rather like the “Normal Distribution” – the ordinary

“Bell curve” – that we see so often in statistics, only they are skewed. Now the Normal

Distribution can be proved to be the natural limit of a great number of other distributions, some

continuous, others discrete. Planck happened to think in terms of discrete distributions, but it seems

to me obvious that he could equally have used continuous ones.

For we are looking at a situation where there is a kind of radiation “noise” built up from waves of

many frequencies. Suppose instead we were to look at a choppy sea and try and analyse the

distribution of the waves. We’d encounter the same kind of problem: waves can vary both in

frequency and in amplitude, and this makes things very complicated. But whatever else we decided

to do, we would reject a model that depended on us declaring either frequency or amplitude to be

“quantised”!

Physicists must have been in a real muddle to allow this idea to be foisted on them. It’s a lazy kind

of idea, when you come to think of it: let’s reduce everything to whole numbers. Let’s decide that

it is only frequency that matters, and that “amplitude” simply does not exist! Let’s declare that a

wave with high amplitude is really a collection of waves, all of standard size, because we like

Planck’s little formula. It’s neat. E = hf is something anyone can remember! The fact that in

reality what we measure is never – or hardly ever – a quantity of energy known to come from just

one “radiating” source is beside the point. What we actually measure is an amount of energy that

comes from some given region. It has a definite frequency, agreed, but it is probably meaningless

to ask just “how many” sources it comes from, for they are not differentiated and, in any case, can

in reality have a continuous range of amplitudes.

Planck’s idea would probably never have been accepted if it had not been for Einstein and his

interpretation of the photoelectric effect. Here, though, we open another can of worms! There may

70 Lorentz, H A, “Theory of Electrons”, Teubner, 1916

71 Giulini, Domenico and Norbert Straumann, “".. I didn't reflect much on what I was doing.." How Planck discovered

his radiation formula”, to be published in Physikalische Blaetter, Dec. 2000, http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0010008 (in

German)

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be some evidence that high frequency light is emitted, e.g. in radioactivity, in packets of fixed size,

but the evidence that any kind of light is converted into individual electrons in the photoelectric

effect is distinctly flimsy. They can’t count individual electrons! All they can do is observe that

the effect has a sharp cut-off depending on frequency and not (or so they say) on intensity (though

is it not possible that if they did observe some effect at a low frequency but high intensity they

would be inclined to interpret this as something else – “thermal” emission, perhaps?).

My investigations into Alain Aspect’s work taught me to be skeptical about any claim to do with

individual photons or electrons, at least for the energy range of his experiments. His light detectors

(photomultipliers) depended on the photoelectric effect, but before he could declare that he had

counted a “photon”, the device would have amplified the initial effect. What size of electric pulse

he finally decided to accept as evidence of the detection of a photon was down to him!

Still, to return to Einstein. I have to confess that I have not read his original work on this, but what

I feel is that the scientific community (or was it mainly the media, led by the New York Times?)

had raised him to god-like status when, after the horrors of the Great War, the world found its

attention drawn to his fabulous ideas. We were informed that our concepts of space and time could

never be the same again. His amazing prediction of the bending of light around the sun had been

confirmed, establishing that his 1914 theory of General Relativity was “true”! From now on,

gravity was not a force but a warping of space-time! In 1919 Eddington had been on an expedition

to make observations during an eclipse, and declared – though quite how remains a mystery, as his

apparatus was not that accurate – that Einstein’s formula was right. More sober voices that

whispered that other explanations were possible were ignored in the blaze of publicity. Anyway,

back in 1905 Einstein had produced this neat little idea of photons converting to electrons, and it all

fitted in with that other mystery, Planck’s model, and with realization that classical theory was in

bad trouble over the structure of the atom, which ought to collapse as the electron ought to radiate

and lose energy. Classical theory was wrong, so Einstein was right! Well, scientists are only

human.

I seem to have taken rather longer than I meant in demolishing (or at least sowing vigorous seeds of

doubt about) our much-acclaimed twin pillars of 20th century physics, and have scarcely mentioned

more constructive ideas. I shall defer them to another chapter, and return for the present to the

EPR saga. At the end of 1995 my husband lost his job. Our financial problems, that had been bad

(a bus driver is not paid enough to support a family without supplements in the form of “Family

Credit”) were worse. I had to take fund raising and/or job hunting more seriously.

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 51

11. Could I do a PhD?

Who pays for this kind of work? Nobody? A PhD would have been useful,

and might have happened but for the untimely death of Euan Squires

“Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom

that becomes effectively permanent is the presence of mavericks in every

generation - people who keep challenging convention and thinking up new

ideas for the sheer hell of it or from an innate contrariness.” Dr. D. M.

Raup, Paleontologist, U. Chicago.

1995 drew to a close, and I realized that I had now spent two years working day and night on my

mission with not a penny to show for it. By my “mission”, I mean the matter of the EPR loopholes

– really hard facts that I had discovered and that the world ought to know about. I counted, and still

count, my ideas on the aether and the nature of matter as just a hobby. I felt that I was doing

sterling work and somehow, some day, someone must surely recognize this and volunteer to

support me, or, better still, both support me and join me in my work. It would have been so nice to

have a collaborator, looking up papers I hadn’t time to look at, writing to contributors to the

archive, putting them straight if they blandly stated that “experiment had confirmed that Nature did

not comply with local realism”, maybe working through a little mathematics with me. The work, of

course, is very much more important to me than what to live on!

Yet one has to live. I am in fact lucky. I live in a country that has reasonable safety-nets to fund

the less fortunate, and I also have a father who has worked hard all his life and earned a good

pension. When our car died of old age, he gave us his old one. When a computer at home seemed

imperative, he paid for one – the one I’m using now, which for some years I had to share with

Daniel. My father, incidentally, has just published some of his own autobiography72. He was a

pilot during the 1939-45 war and, though he rarely mentioned them to us children, has a few stories

to tell the rest of the world.

To return to the present theme – the thorny matter of money – I came across other “dissidents” who

were not so fortunate. Most managed to have some regular job, but many struggled and I would

suspect that most never got past the first post. One of the strugglers is my friend Andrei Kirilyuk,

working in Kiev. I don’t know if things have improved at all, but in 1996 when I first heard from

him (he was among the first people to write to me after my Chaotic Ball paper had been put in the

“quant-ph” archive, late 1996) they were not being paid regularly. It was cold, both at work and at

home. He depended on his brother for use of a computer to access the archive and do email.

Andrei has a vision of how the universe works, but his attempts at communicating this get lost in

verbiage. Without “brick walls” against whom to throw his ideas, how can he learn how to make

them comprehensible? How can he get this exchange with others unless he can spend time in an

environment in which there is genuine intellectual freedom?

I have always found Andrei’s email a delight to read, but his papers are heavy going. I’m not the

only person to have tried to persuade him to make them more readable, but it’s no good – perhaps it

is the subject matter that’s the problem. Last year he did revise his quant-ph papers73 but, judging

by the abstracts, there is still some way to go! Anyway, his emails are fascinating. I seem to have

lost his first, but here is an example on an all-too-familiar topics: getting ones papers published.

(Later that year he sent a truly beautiful one, commenting on my first attempt at this book.)

72

73 Kirilyuk, Andrei P, “Causal Wave Mechanics and the Advent of Complexity. I. Dynamic multivaluedness” ,

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9511034 , replaced with revised version Thu, 25 March 1999

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From: Kiril@metfiz.freenet.kiev.ua (Andrei Kirilyuk)

Subject: Re: "Objective" review!!!!!!!!

Date: Mon, 2 Jun 97 00:38:40 EET

Organization: Metallofizika

Dear Caroline,

I am sorry for the problems you have with refereeing of your article. I do

not know whether this can help you, but to my opinion, this is not a

specific problem for your article involving that particular referee. This

is between 'us' and 'them', that is between those who think about the

truth and those who think more about their 'company', position, etc. The

'big man' in question even does not hesitate to speak on behalf of some

privileged circle of 'those who decide', he does not take any care to make

reference to other articles in confirmation of his statements, or to leave

a chance for others to express their views, correctly but in their own

fashion; he is the 'highest instance' in himself. And it does not matter

at all that neither him, nor other 'selected people' do not know at all

how to resolve the numerous enigmas of quantum mechanics, but instead

create and publish everywhere indeed ridiculous guesses about specific

'quantum logic' and 'coherent histories' ... All the stuff can well be

published in most prestigious 'Letters', no problem for them, 'the great',

it is their 'private domain'.

Imagine that I had practically the same problems with Letters journals,

with the same kind of referee reports on my articles. Since then I do not

waste my time for them (it does not mean you should go the same way).

In any case one should calmly maintain ones efforts, continue to create

and try to publish, although I do not think neither that we should be

absolutely calm and agree with the existence of that horrible system of

killing the creations and the creators. Apart from this general

disagreement and in expectation of changes for better world, there are two

constructive possibilities in that situation: either you continue to

insist on publishing in the same journal (PRL in your case), or you try to

look for something formally less prestigious, but probably more objective

and free (one can also try both). Each way has its own advantages and

disadvantages, and the particular choice depends rather on one's

subjective preferences. In my own case, I am too lazy to spend my time and

efforts in fighting with fools when there is too many of them at all the

key positions. So I made the option for another suitable journal (though

it is not always easy to find one). However, some people consider that

there is a sense to fight for publication in each particular case

(provided there is no true mistakes, but just 'general' problems of the

kind you have) because formally they have no right to through you off like

this, you may insist, demand other referee, etc. and finally they are

obliged to accept. The problem here is that you cannot know how much

efforts this will cost, and there is no guarantee that you will finally

win.

Without insisting on one of these subjective choices, I would still advise

you to incline more for other journal, carefully choosing it by the

estimated probability of publication. This becomes especially evident

today taking into account the development of the situation with

publications, their quality and quantity. To my opinion, the more and more

people read, and especially make reference to, the reprints that they

receive from their 'preferred' colleagues directly. It is important simply

that the article is published in a refereed journal. In a number of cases,

including some famous ones, a preprint can be sufficient, and today we

have in addition those electronic archives. Publishing in a prestigious

journal surely has some advantages, but finally more serious disadvantages

(like inefficient loss of time and efforts), especially for people

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 53

presenting their results and not their relations. At least such is the

conclusion from my own experience.

Whatever your choice, I am sure a positive issue will be found. Most important is the

success of creation, the result, where we are the main referees of our own work, fortunately.

Keep me informed about further development of the situation with your work.

I am currently also 'under pressure', limited by the urgent necessity to

find a practical possibility to do science, from one hand, and to finish a

big piece of work, from the other hand. The fight continues, as they say,

and the rest is not in the agenda...

Bonne chance.

Andrei

That’s one of his shorter ones!

My own case, so far as the material necessities of life were concerned, was relatively fortunate,

though it has not always felt so! At least I have had the time, the library access, and, with the help

of this computer, been able to test out my ideas quite well on the Internet. Those conferences have

been invaluable. I have always managed to get some help with travel expenses, sometimes also

with accommodation, but I have tended to feel guilty. There are always other expenses, and what I

spend the family does not. Just once in our married life we had a four-day family holiday, but the

children would never have had a real one if it had not been for my sister Biddy, who whisked them

away every so often. We got by, but I have continued to search the job advertisements.

In 1995-6 I applied for various clerical jobs, assistant librarian posts and similar. I went and talked

to careers advisors and joined the local Job Club, but to no avail. One of my handicaps was that I

had not taken the trouble to learn Welsh, but mainly I think that everyone realized I just would not

fit in. I was “overqualified”, and yet without qualifications! I could not even type – and still can’t.

As for my attempt at joining the British Telecom Directory Enquiries team – then farmed out to a

firm called “Blue Arrow” – in retrospect is was funny, but at the time I was just plain scared! I

failed their two-week training course as I simply could not find numbers from their data base

quicky enough. Everyone else could, but not me: I panicked. Every time a call came in, I was sure

it was going to be a Welsh speaker wanting the number of the nearest hospital and I wouldn’t be

able to understand. Even if they were English, I had a peculiar inability to grasp what they wanted.

By the time I had questioned them, sometimes chatting to keep them happy while I laboured at the

keyboard exploring the data base, there was no way I was going to reach the target: 150 calls an

hour!

Once, just once, there was a job advertisement in the New Scientist for a statistician. I had been

searching the ads for years, and here, at last, was the opportunity – at IGER (the International

Grassland and Environmental Research Station) half and hour’s drive away. I had a sinking

feeling about it, though. I applied because everyone said I should. I got an interview, but I knew it

was hopeless. What they wanted was someone to help people find their way around the various

statistical packages, not the kind of statistician I used to be, designing experiments and relying on a

separate Computer Unit to analyse results. I had made an effort to find out a little about modern

methods – I had gone to a few statistics practical classes at the university – but they saw through

me: it would have been the blind leading the blind! Of course, given a few weeks, I’d probably

have loved it and even been good at it, but I understood when they turned me down.

From time to time I tested the water for funding for the research I was in fact doing. There were a

couple of great tomes up in the library listing charities that supported research. I could not find any

Adventures of a Realist

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, November 22, 2020 54

that looked very likely to support my particular kind, but I wrote to the Royal Society in London,

the British Association and the British Federation of Women Graduates. Everyone expressed

sympathy and even interest, but said sorry, I was not eligible for anything they could think of. I

tried the Leverhulme Trust, which Ian Percival had suggested at the Durham conference, but after

much battling with forms and writing of essays, it all came to the same thing: research funding in

physics is not available except to people with at least a PhD and preferably already in an established

academic post! The Leverhulme grants, for example, are intended mainly for those who have been

doing research and need a career break in order to write it up.

So I thought, not for the first time, about doing a PhD. For this you need two things: a grant and a

supervisor. Now I happened to see in my New Scientist an advertisement for PhD grants at

University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Twelve of them, I believe there were, so I thought why not me?

My friends and contacts tried to warn me! I never had a chance. Various departments had their

own star students lined up and I was not in the running, simply because I had not been through the

official mill. So the grant was a problem, and, as it turned out, so was the supervisor. In the good

old days, almost anyone could have taken me on, as nobody doubted my ability to write a PhD

thesis based on my work. Producing my thesis for my MSc had given me the right kind of practice

– Horst had seen to that, nit-picking till I produced a perfect document. But the rules had changed,

so that supervisors now felt that they really did have to understand their student’s work, and nobody

at Aberystwyth felt they qualified. Maybe my friend David Falla would have managed, only he

was officially retired and apparently that disqualified him. So I asked Alastair Rae in Birmingham,

and my friend in Durham, Euan Squires, and tried further afield – couldn’t Franco Selleri maybe

supervise me? Wheels began to turn, ideas about sharing the supervision between Durham and

Aberystwyth began to take shape, but then all was abandoned: I hadn’t got that grant.

That was when this book really started. I quote from Euan’s message of 23 April, 1996:

Who needs a Ph.D? I think you are right that the Ph.D. route is not the

best one for you at this stage.

Trying to get papers published is one way of getting publicity. Have you

thought about writing a book? Maybe it could include a translation of

Aspect's thesis, together with reprints of some other articles. I have no

idea about whether you could find a publisher, but there seems to be a

big market for things that ``question'' the consensus of science.

It has taken a while, but here is my book. Sadly, Euan died that summer. He was only in his mid

50s but had a bad heart, apparently, and collapsed while playing cricket.

I owe a lot to Euan Squires. It was for his benefit that I wrote my essay on Lorentz and the Aether74

that has now gained me quite a fan club on the Internet. He is one of the few people to have

encouraged me in my ideas about the fundamental nature of matter – about oscillating electrons that

are only “electrons” rather than “positrons” by virtue of being at the right place at the right time,

about the way the aether might move with solid bodies, how forces really work and everything. His

own interests towards the end were mainly concerned with consciousness, but in one of his last

emails he confessed that he thought his colleagues at a conference he’d just attended quite crazy!

74 Thompson, C H, “Lorentz, Relativity and the Propagation of E-M Waves”,

http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat/Essays/aether.htm

Caroline H Thompson

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12. Oxford

Not so happy! I’d argued with Trevor Marshall over “induced coherence”,

and lost my friend and supporter, Squires. I was not so popular! These

people wanted to continue their careers, based around quantum computing.

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top

problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I

lost long ago." - Robert Oppenheimer

[15:10:00]

It was not until just before the next annual conference, the Fifth UK Conference on Fundamental

Problems in Quantum Theory, to be held in Oxford in September 1996, that I discovered that Euan

Squires had passed away. Trevor told me on the phone, and it was a shock. He had become my

confidante, despite frequent absences at conferences etc. or being too busy to reply to emails (they

are all as bad as each other that way, these Department Heads). I had not worried too much about

the lack of response to my last few messages, and had been looking forward to meeting him again.

The summer had somehow disappeared, the final work on my Chaotic Ball paper proving a

considerable strain, and I had been promising myself that I would start the book as soon as this was

finished, but without his support, and with Trevor’s almost active discouragement (and he is still

not encouraging me, though he has helped with a few points of fact!) I shelved the project.

I settled down rather grimly to making arrangements for the conference. There had been no visits

to Trevor and Natalie in Manchester that year, and I was feeling torn apart. I enjoyed Trevor’s

company, and was interested in some of his ideas on subjects such as the structure of the electron.

(Though his theory was related to QED, it was not Feynman’s version with its “point particle”

electron but nearer that of the other members of the team, Schwinger, Tomanegar and Deison75.) In

March, though, we had had a truly awful row. I had been white with fury when I found that he was

going to send a paper to Nature that included some statements that I thought were simply not true.

It was the same “induced coherence” conflict that had been simmering for six months now, and it

had come to the boil. He was, I thought, reporting the results of thought-experiments as if they

were real ones, an error that happens every day in the world of quantum optics but which I felt had

no place in the paper of a realist. I drafted a critical paper to Nature and threatened to send it. I

believe I did send it to his colleagues!

I forget exactly how the episode ended. They can’t have published his paper or I’d have known

about it. He still, in year 2000, has not deigned to discuss my criticisms or my alternative ideas as

to how the real experiments work. His long-suffering wife, Natalie, looks on with puzzled

amusement.

At the time of the conference, I was still backing timing problems as the main cause of the more

interesting “Bell test violations”, and came up with what I thought was a nice analogy to illustrate

my talk. I thought about a whole crowd of people all wanting to take their driving tests, and the

analogy depended on the difference between assuming they only take it once or immediately book

another if they fail. I can’t quite remember now how it worked, and nobody at the conference

seems to have grasped it, so I shall not try and explain it here. It went down well in the talk though:

the audience had been falling asleep, at the end of the afternoon in a stuffy room, and this woke

them up. They enjoyed the entertainment, whether I was right or wrong!

It was not a happy time, though. My fear of travelling had not improved, nor my stage fright. With

Euan not there, and Selleri not turning up, I knew a few faces but had no real friends. People

75 Schweber, Sam S, “QED and the men who made it" ???

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seemed on the defensive. I had hoped to get the Bohm-De Broglie experts – Chris Dewdney and

his colleagues – interested in testing some idea or other, but they didn’t take the bait. I had stayed

for a night or two before the conference with a friend of my sister Biddy’s, Jane Houchin, and had

been studying Stuart Freedman’s thesis (1972: he had been in at the beginning of EPR experiments)

as bed-time reading. There seemed to be something curious about the way he measured the “timing

resolution” of his detectors, and I discussed this with Jane. She is not a physicist but an expert on

neurology, but she had no problem following this detail: an instrument is an instrument, and one

finds out its characteristics much the same way in any discipline. What physics needed was a few

more people like her! The community was suffering from inbreeding!

Several generations of bright young people had by now been indoctrinated in the modern theories,

taught that they could not trust “common sense”. At the conference was a certain Mark Hadley,

and fear that he is one of these. He approached me after my talk and discussed the issue of

“nonlocality”. He thought, despite everything I’d said, that it really did happen. Back home, we

exchanged a few emails, but it just didn’t work out: we tried, but we just could not agree. A note

in my diary mentioned that he thought more people believed in fairies than didn’t believe in the

photon!

A year or so later I found out a little more about him: he must have been in the middle of a PhD

when we met, for a New Scientist article mentioned it and described his theory of “time-loops”.

He must have needed the nonlocality idea to justify his thesis! I re-opened our discussion, but by

December 1997 he was telling me:

There is a model for particle interactions, it is QM. There is only one model that works. This

model UNAVOIDABLY predicts non-locality. You cannot have QM and not have the non-

locality that goes with it. You say there is no evidence for it whatsoever; this is statement is

false - if you make such statements you will bring ridicule upon yourself.

We tried to be civil – in fact we were civil, remaining courteous in a way that is by no means usual

in this kind of confrontation – but not long after this I filed the correspondence away under “Foes”.

This was not quite the end of the story. To add insult to injury, the New Scientist proceeded a year

or so later to publish yet another article on him. Why were they giving his crazy ideas so much

publicity? I drafted a letter to them and sent Mark a copy, and really he could not have been more

reasonable, considering that I had displayed, as he put it “antagonism, bordering on rudeness”.

His final email to me, April 1999, ended:

I don't know if it is Psychological or not. We all have to take a gamble at what we accept

and build upon and what we reject, challenge, and try to replace. Judgement and intuition

play a role too. I think many great scientists have succeeded because their judgement about

what to build upon was different and better than their contemporaries. If you can win your

arguments then you will go down in history and I will have been wasting my time! If I am

right then most of Stephen Hawking's work will be an irrelevance, as will the quantum

gravity research! The stakes are high.

> [CHT] Anyway, I think I shall send off my New Scientist letter

> roughly as it stands.

You are most welcome, it is an honest opinion which I have no desire to suppress. You are

in good company if you think that my work is irrelevant and not deserving of publicity.

Caroline H Thompson

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It’s impossible to feel anything but sadness. I sent off my letter76, but of course they did not publish

it.

Not quite everyone went with the flow at the conference. There was Tim Spiller, who works in

quantum computing – I’ve seen an article that mentioned his name in a recent edition of Physics

World. He did seem to have understood my talk, though my idea that he might persuade Hewlett

Packard to look into the realities of the experiments came to nothing. I imagine he did not want to

lose his job!

But I must backtrack a little, for I have not explained how I came to meet Nancy Cartwright.

Nancy is a philosopher/scientist, lecturing at the London School of Economics when you can catch

her in England, and she too seems to have kept hold of her self-confidence, believing in her own

intuition when it comes to what is possible and what is not. She comes from the States. Anyway,

she had written a book that hinted at dissatisfaction with the whole way physics is being conducted:

“How the Laws of Physics Lie”77, and I had happened to stumble upon it in the library. I’d written

to her and she had replied enthusiastically, so, as she lived in Oxford and had been invited to the

conference anyway, we arranged to meet. She could not in the end spare the time to attend more

than a few minutes of the conference, but we managed to meet long enough to arrange for me to go

round to her house.

Oh to be like Nancy! There was me, trying not to let it show that I was nervous even of that short

journey. I had to travel a few stops by bus, then make my way in the twilight across enormous

roads – we don’t have roads like that in Wales and it was a long time now since I’d lived in the

bustling South-East, in Kent. Nancy is confident, self-composed, organized, offering casual

welcome to guests – and, it seemed, wealthy. The house was probably not large, but it gave a sense

of opulence. Anyway, I joined her and one guest as they were finishing dinner, having already

eaten myself. We talked, drank a little wine, and I tried to explain my latest ideas. Couldn’t

someone like her really shake things up? Surely what was being done in the name of science was

illogical. Surely someone must be interested in the actual experiments!

Back at Durham the previous year, Euan had joked that he had never even seen a photomultiplier.

I haven’t seen one myself (not one like Aspect’s anyway, and this is very remiss of me) but I have

studied diagrams of them, read carefully every detail of Aspect’s explanations of how he chose his

instruments and chose the settings, the screening, the electronics. These people at the conferences

lived in “thought-experiments”, or in imaginary applications of this wonderful entanglement effect

that had never been proved to exist. Even when their work was backed by experiment, who was it

who did the dirty work? Would one of these erudite superbeings have known how to focus a beam

of light? Nancy listened. She had heard it all before, and did not hold much hope. She wished me

all the very best, but, of course, had her own agenda – students to teach, papers to write ...

Her main thesis in her book was the idea of “causal inference” – that if a model is really right, you

should be able to tweak its parameters and predict the results, showing that your action in doing the

tweaking is the most likely cause of those results. (That’s my interpretation, anyway.) Now in EPR

experiments, I reckon I could tweak parameters that would cause results not expected by the

quantum mechanical model. I could prove it wrong. Of course, the belief in the effect has become

so entrenched that there might be many arguing that, well, maybe these optical tests were not

actually testing quantum systems. Maybe they were “macroscopic” after all, and the ordinary laws

of logic applied. Die-hards might argue that nobody has proved that magic doesn’t happen in

“genuine” quantum systems! There again, I would have shown that nobody has shown that it does,

76 http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat/Letters/newsci_apr24.htm

77 Cartwright, Nancy, “How the Laws of Physics Lie”, Clarendon Press 1983

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so maybe, just maybe, they would begin to find their audience of true believers melt away. For we

have progressed, have we not, from the age when the unknown was labelled “Here be dragons”?

The other parts of Nancy’s book that I remember are her description of a device called a radiometer,

a discussion of Bethe’s calculation of the “Lamb shift”, and some ideas about how forces really

add. These all tallied so well with my own impression of the situation! The radiometer must have

been Crooke’s radiometer, invented way back in the mid-1800s, a little instrument that consisted of

a pair of vanes on a spindle in an evacuated glass chamber. The vanes were painted white one side,

black the other, and when you shone light on them they turned. But why? It looks like the effect

of radiation pressure, yet what has happened to the momentum? Surely the black side radiates as

much as the white one eventually, only at longer wavelengths, so why should it turn one way rather

than the other? Apparently people still don’t quite agree on what is really happening, yet modern

text books will tell you some definite story or other, with no hint of doubt.

Bethe’s calculation was supposed to correctly predict the Lamb shift, which is one of those tiny

shifts in the position of a spectral line on which theoreticians set such store. It was a typical

examples of quantum theory maths, in which things are by no means as clear-cut as they were at

school! The result only comes out right if you do things the right way! As so often, its all a

matter of assumptions and approximations. The maths may look impressive, but by the time

you’ve actually worked it out and found you can’t do it unless you make this that and the other

approximation and assume such and such “boundary conditions”, well, it may not bear that much

relation to what you started with. In any event, to say that what you have done is show that

quantum theory “predicts” the Lamb shift is somewhat of an exaggeration. Predicting a

phenomenon, and being capable of adaptation to produce compatibility with it are two different

things.

So I could not really query Nancy’s right to carry on teaching rather than drop all and follow me!

During that year (1996) I had had quite a few contacts with her, by email and phone. I must get in

touch again. Somehow we drifted apart after one of her visits to the States and a change of email

address, but some day I must discuss with there this little matter of how forces work. What does it

really mean to say you have got two acting at once?

Caroline H Thompson

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13. “Φ-waves”, Forces and Fundamental Matters

Speculations on the how it all works. Having abolished the photon and

rejected Einstein’s agenda, what do I think really happens?

“When I examined myself and my methods of thought, I came to the

conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for

absorbing positive knowledge.” Albert Einstein [from Ben Best]

“Since we can hardly admit that one and the same medium is capable of

transmitting two or more actions by wholly different mechanisms, all forces

may be regarded as connected more or less intimately with those which we

study in electromagnetism ... The nature of this connection is entirely

unknown ...”, Hendrik Lorentz, “Theory of Electrons”, p46 (Teubner, 1916)

“Nature tends to wild profusion, which our thinking does not wholly

confine.” Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, p 19 (Clarendon

Press, 1983)

What do we really know about a force such as magnetism? What do we really know about light? I

very much regret that my only direct experience of magnetism is playing around with magnets my

son had rescued from the innards of various machines, and once upon a time checking for myself

that a coil of wire and a current could magnetise a nail. I have already hinted at how I view light: as

essentially longitudinal waves in an aether. I’ll come back to that, but for now let’s think about

forces.

You hold one magnet near another, and the force acting on it may not be directed towards it at all.

Mathematically, this is no problem: the accepted picture is that the magnet is equivalent to two

poles, one North and one South, and the force you are sensing is the vector sum of forces acting

directly towards or away from these poles. Faraday, though, a man who had an enormous

influence over our view of these matters, thought in terms of lines or tubes of force. These go out

from one pole and curve round to come in at the other. They are, he thought, what the iron filings

you sprinkled on that piece of paper at school are really showing us. He thought in terms of

tensions along the lines and some kind of repulsion between neighbouring ones, holding them

slightly apart. His analogy was tubes of rubber.

Faraday invented the line of force, and the mental image is vivid. The trouble is, though, that I

think it is misleading. I think it misled James Clerk Maxwell when he came to trying to understand

forces then, later, after the discovery of radio waves, when he tried to use these ideas to understand

electromagnetic radiation of all kinds.

Let’s go back to what we think a magnet “really is”. I have never seen any convincing evidence

that Ampère had not got the right idea when he assumed that inside the magnet there are circling

currents, so the problem boils down to “How does circling current exert at force on anything else?”

This is something I have thought about on and off ever since I first heard about it, and I have kept

returning to a basic idea. The system sends out very very short wavelength waves (possibly at a

length known as the Compton wavelength of the electron, but possibly shorter). These waves I call

Φ-waves. They are waves in the aether – possibly plain pressure waves, but more likely, I think,

waves of change of state of the aether itself, waves of “Φ”. Φ-waves would inevitably be

accompanied by tiny pressure waves, but this is a detail that need not concern us. Some day it may

all become clear. Anyway, let us for the present assume that our circling current consists of just

one circling “electron”. (Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure the electron exists!) The electron

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spontaneously generates these Φ-waves in neat patterns. It also takes them in from all directions.

The whole operation takes place in a continuous sea of aether, the electron and everything else in

the whole universe being made of it. Φ-waves from distant sources arrive all superimposed on each

other, forming an effectively random background. “Particles” are individual or linked groupd of

wave centers, perpetually trying to tidy things up. Between particles, waves just move, and some of

these will be bombarding our electron.

If Φ-waves are not too strong, they don’t interact with each other, but near other particles they will

be strong. Here they interact. They cause the particle (wave center) they reach to try and get in

harmony – in phase – with themselves. The particle is jiggled perpetually this way and that, for it

is receiving invitations to harmonise from all directions at once, in all variety of phases, so it has to

make the best compromise it can. It will tend to “couple” most strongly with incoming waves that

are either very strong or stay in the same pattern for a long time – have long “coherence length”.

So that’s it, if you come to think about it! That’s how all forces work: they are the net result of

particles trying to get in phase with each other. I’m assuming that they are, at this level, all

oscillating at the same frequency, other than minor variations due to relative motion causing

Doppler shifts.

Ah, but those minor variations will not always be so minor! Suppose we have an electron,

pulsating away, and its neighbour starts to run away from it. The waves coming back will be

longer, so, other things being equal, our electron will tend to run to catch up, so that it can once

again hold hands. (Sorry to be so anthropomorphic. My little electrons are not the cold dull objects

I was once upon a time taught about in physics classes. They are almost as “alive” as we are!)

Hmm ... but aren’t electrons supposed to repel each other? I wouldn’t be so sure. I don’t think

we’ve really sorted out what happens. We have tried to develop the theory of moving electrons

using information gained from experiments with static electricity, and Nature has not always done

what we expected her to. This tendency of electrons to chase each other is now accepted in the

quantum theory of superconductivity – the idea of “Cooper pairs” – but wasn’t it really there all

along? Isn’t it at the basis of the everyday observation that when you switch on the light it tends to

be either ‘on’ or ‘off’, not ‘half on’?

[21:10:00]

So electrons tend to chase each other, only not too close: they don’t want to get less than a

wavelength away or they will be fighting! Somehow, this tendency also works to draw together

streams of electrons flowing parallel to each other. They tend to be pushed by random waves from

other directions, but can exist comfortably moving alongside similar electrons. So this is one kind

of “force” – the force of attraction between currents that are parallel. My idea of how magnetism

works is related to this: the electrons in the magnet are moving in circles, and any other electron

that is able to mimic this will do so, as a result of its interaction with the Φ-waves of the first. If it

either starts off circling in the right way, or adjusts its motion to synchronization, it finds itself

buffeted by waves from other directions and comfortable in the proximity of the electrons of the

magnet.

This is what we see when those iron filings arrange themselves along Faraday’s field lines. The

electrons in each one have adjusted to the influence of the magnet. They also adjust to each other,

within the filing, and to the newly-formed magnetism of their neighbours in nearby filings. They

arrange themselves in rows, not along pre-existing “field lines” but just as the whim takes them.

The position of the lines depends on random factors concerning the initial distribution.

Incidentally, if I remember rightly you do have to jiggle the paper with the filings on before you see

the pattern, so there is another source of energy and these other, mechanical, random forces helping

to make the filing move.

Caroline H Thompson

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So I’ve made a start, I feel, at understanding how magnetism works. It is only a small start – there

are so many things I don’t know, some because I’m out here on my own with no tame expert to

consult. I’ve thought mostly in terms of electrons as more-or-less “points”, the mathematical

temporary centres of sets of pulsations in the aether, but who knows? In crystals, for example,

might the sources of pulsation be arranged in complete flat sheets, with the nuclei of the atoms at

points where several sheets cross? In a wire conducting electricity, perhaps the “electron sea” that

they talk of these days has no special organization at the level of the electron, but is able to carry Φ-

waves that can form themselves into electrons when required ...

But whatever the details, I think I have made progress: I have seen the general way in which the

“fields” of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory are likely to actually work. They may look static, but

if you move the source they get renewed, I would presume at rate c. The source must send out

waves in the aether to renew them. With a fluid aether, it is hard to see any other choice. It can’t

just spontaneously have pressure gradients as they would even out unless there is some constant

renewal of their cause. So I’m agreeing with Lorentz (see quotation at the head of this chapter)

about everything boiling down to electromagnetism, only I think we need to break this down and

consider the next layer. At this next level, everything is oscillating. There are no steady forces at

all. Φ-waves are everywhere, mostly unnoticed by us giants. We, or our instruments, only notice

them when they carry larger-scale patterns.

There are many many problems left to be solved, and, as I said, more expert knowledge is needed

before anyone can really attempt to solve them. What forms the boundaries of nuclei, or of

crystals? What is “charge”? I seem to be able to imagine how magnetism works and how moving

currents interact, but not so easily at all how two static charged bodies do. There have to be rules.

There must be some standard “amount of aether oscillation”, and negatively charged bodies might

have more than their complement, positively charged ones less. The forces of attraction and

repulsion might be the net effect of something more like a diffusion process, the consequence of

Nature’s capriciousness! As I said, She must have rules. Sometimes, at certain distances, She

decides that these are the very best distances and any attempts to change them will be resisted. At

other times, She realizes there has been a mistake, and “forces” come into play to try and correct it.

She plays a game that will never lose its challenge, though! Try as She will to get everything neat

and tidy, the faster She mops up one mess the faster She creates others!

I’d better leave it at that for the moment. I hear the brave “real physicists” among my readers

throwing up their hands in horror, saying “Christ, woman, is there no end to the waffle? What use

is all this hand-waving to us?” And, of course, they are right, in a way, but then my aim is not to

“do physics” in their sense. I do not need to calculate anything. I’m merely trying to understand,

and if, as seems likely, the answer is that though we can begin to understand it all looks vastly too

complicated to attempt a mathematical model, so be it. Unless we recognize our ignorance, we

shall just carry on in complacency, endlessly papering over the cracks in both quantum theory and

classical electromagnetism. Maybe this is all we can do, but let’s not be dogmatic about it. Let’s

recognize that all we have got are some tools for calculations, and some analogies that have some of

the same features as the real world but by no means all.

Some features of the mathematical model may have no counterpart, and this, of course, is where I

came in, “quantum entanglement” being a case in point. Let’s return now to hard facts – those Bell

tests! There is no hand-waving or speculation in the statement that the world has been told a

misleading story. My next adventure (overlapping with the Oxford episode to a large extent) was a

“virtual” one, over the Internet: I made friends with Sue in Australia. She and Barry had their own

ideas about the aether and it did not seem too different from mine, but what brought us together was

our old friend, the Bell test loopholes. If it had not been for them, I would probably never have

investigated the loophole that might be, historically, the most important of all: the “accidentals”

one.

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14. The Australian Connection

Sue Sulcs, Barry Gilbert, and the subtraction of accidentals

“The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and

the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.” Sir

William Osler [from Ben Best]

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Phillip K Dick [from Ben Best]

Now, as you may remember, in 1995 I had been to Italy and come back with one really important

trophy – a copy of Alain Aspect’s thesis. In that same year, I happened to come by another

valuable document – the draft of a paper by two Australians, Barry Gilbert and Sue Sulcs. Their

paper led to correspondence that, taken together with information from the thesis, was to lead to the

unveiling of another scandal in the EPR story, the “subtraction of accidentals”.

Sue and Barry had begun to develop an intuitive theory very like my own, calling it CWN or

“Continuous Waves plus Noise”. They were radio experts, working, as I later discovered, for

Telstra, the Australian telecommunications people. They had devised a simulation of an EPR

experiment using radio antennae, the model working much the same way as mine. This was not all,

though: their whole attitude matched mine, placing little value on incomprehensible mathematical

models. They even rejected Lorentz Invariance -- a subject on which Trevor had steadfastly

refused to compromise!

In spare moments, I had read and re-read the paper carefully. The general idea of a universe that

depended on Continuous Waves and Noise (CWN) seemed very good, not dissimilar to my own

and in no real conflict with Trevor and Emilio’s Stochastic Electrodynamics (SED). There were a

couple of differences, though, that drew me to these people. There were a few points on which they

disagreed with SED, and it so happened that I shared these disagreements.

One was of no special relevance to the EPR question: it was just that, as I mentioned, they did not

assume “Lorentz Invariance”. If you have a theory based on an aether, this is an unnatural

assumption, and the papers by Tim Boyer78 that Trevor had recommended had failed to convince

me that it made sense. It is an extension of the assumption that Galileo, for example, made about

the relativity of motion, but whereas Galileo’s version is just common sense, the extension is not.

Galileo explained it in terms a beautiful little analogy79:

“Shut yourself up with a friend in the largest room below decks of some large ship and there

procure gnats, flies, and such other small winged creatures. Also get a great tub full of

water and within it put certain fishes; let also a certain bottle be hung up, which drop by

drop lets forth its water into another narrow-necked bottle placed underneath. Then, the

ship lying still, observe how those small winged animals fly with like velocity towards all

sides; and how the distilling drops all fall into the bottle placed underneath. And casting

anything towards your friend, you need not throw it with more force one way than another,

provided the distances be equal; and jumping broad, you will reach as far one way as

another. Having observed all these particulars, though no man doubts that, so long as the

vessel stands still, they ought to take place in this manner, make the ship move with what

velocity you please, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that.

78 Boyer, Timothy H, “The Classical Vacuum”, Scientific American, August 1985, pp 56-62

79 Galileo, Galilei, “Dialogues” [quoted by George Gamow in “Biography of Physics”, 1962]

Caroline H Thompson

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You shall not be able to discern the least alteration in all the forenames effects, nor can you

gather by any of them whether the ship moves or stands still.”

Now this is all well and good if all you are concerned about is the motion of a ship, but towards the

end of the 19th century people had begun to worry about what happened if you moved at nearly the

speed of light. They seemed to have forgotten, too, that Galileo specified a closed room, with no

information coming in from the outside world. Einstein and others extended this simple truth about

every day relative motion to any uniform motion, regardless of where it took place and regardless

of how fast it was. They accepted as a postulate that the laws of physics were the same in all

“inertial frames” – all situations in which there was at most uniform relative motion. All frames in

uniform motion they declared to be equivalent. (Oh, and incidentally these inertial frames must

have no forces such as gravity acting in them. As this is rather difficult to achieve in practice – one

needs to be in a satellite or in a free-falling lift – it is usual to compromise by saying that one will

only consider the laws insofar as they affect motion in directions at right angles to gravity.)

How this assumption came to be known as Lorentz invariance I do not know, as Lorentz was a

practical man. He believed in an aether, and surely this must define a basic, preferred, frame?

Perhaps he did think that the laws of physics that he knew – Maxwell’s equations and such like –

were invariant despite the aether, but I don’t think he would have dreamed of making this an article

of faith. Poor man, his name was also taken in vain in “Lorentz contraction”, which was, to him, a

real contraction that he thought took place when things moved fast – fast with respect to the aether,

that is. Einstein’s Special Relativity involves a contraction with the same formula, but opinions

differ as to whether or not this is really supposed to happen: you, the observer, are supposed to think

that the other person’s rod has shrunk, while he thinks that yours has, which makes the whole thing

an optical illusion due to the fact that light takes time to travel from you to him and back. This is

quite different from Lorentz’ idea of contraction as a result of interaction with the aether.

For myself, I was sure intuitively that there was an aether, but knew that I did not know what that

aether did. As for what the laws of physics should be if I moved very fast, I would not have liked to

speculate. It seemed unlikely that anyone actually knew. If, as I thought at the time, all that the

Michelson-Morley experiments were telling us was that the aether moved with the surface of the

Earth (I now know it doesn’t, but never mind) then obviously they could tell us nothing about

motion relative to the aether.

The net result of all these considerations is that I was very pleased to read in a paper that my friend

Franco Selleri published at about this time80 that he thought you must have a preferred frame in

order to make sense of the world, and that maybe you needed to modify Maxwell’s rules just a little

if you wanted to go exceptionally fast. He and I, as well as Barry and Sue, were in agreement here.

* * * * * * * *

So much, then, for the aether and relative motion. The main purpose of Barry and Sue’s paper had

been two-fold: to discuss our old friend, the Bell tests, and to introduce a new model for the

detection process. We seemed to agree totally about the fact that detection, for the low intensities

involved, was a matter of adding noise then applying a threshold. They had done a useful little

computer simulation to show how this would work – how a signal could be recovered from a

mixture that was mostly noise. We almost agreed about the Bell tests too, and they shared at least

one criticism of Trevor and Emilio’s approach: they thought it was noise at the detectors that

mattered, not noise at the polarizers. I was puzzled, though. They thought that the detectors might

have shared the same noise – which indeed they might – and this could be at least part of the reason

80 Selleri, Franco, “Noninvariant one-way velocity of light”, Foundations of Physics 26, 641-664 (1996)

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for the infringements of Bell tests. They had done another computer simulation to support their

argument, but it was not quite clear how this worked. For one thing, it was clear that they had not

been on a programming course, for the notation was not self-explanatory and it was not sprinkled

with helpful comments! For another, the way they had done it meant that “time” and “polariser

setting” had somehow become confused.

This remained in the back of my mind for several months, as I was busy with other matters – ye

olde “induced coherence” argument with Trevor and the conference in Durham. By January 1996,

though, curiosity got the better of me. I made enquiries, found out their email address and began to

correspond, sending copies of my papers (by now the original “Explosion of a Quantum Myth” had

transformed into the “Chaotic Ball” and gained some informal companions covering other

loopholes.)

For the next year or so Sue and I exchanged emails almost daily, despite her other commitments.

Both she and Barry had full-time jobs with “Telstra”, the Australian Telecommunications people.

(So far as I know, Barry, at least, is still there, but there was a problem with email last time I wrote.

Sue had left to have another baby and write up her PhD – on the EPR experiments.) They are

experts on radio communications, which explains why they thought in terms of a radio antenna as

an analogy for a polariser in their simulation. My heart warmed to them. People with their feet

firmly in the real world were not going to go far wrong! Besides, I think Maxwell and his

successors were right in the 19th century when they assumed light was similar to radio, all a matter

of some kind of continuous wave produced by an oscillating electric charge. The same principles

of radio-type antennae and resonances seem to be important right down to the smallest scales,

within the atom itself. Possibly the mere fact that Sue and Barry came from Australia helped them

to hang on to their common sense: I have never heard of anyone doing “quantum entanglement”

experiments down under.

Sue was interested in all I could tell her about Aspect’s work. She knew no French, so depended on

me for translation. I discussed absolutely everything with her, but by February I had decided there

was definitely something wrong with their simulation. We discussed and discussed, and I did my

own little simulation to show that correlated noise was not enough to cause the problem: after all,

this is something perfectly normal, and Bell’s test in its perfect form had no reason to fail. It is only

the peculiar version that is used in practice, with the illegal “normalization”, that can fail for all

sorts of trivial reasons. The arguments went on and on, at times causing almost as much anguish as

my wrangles with Trevor. Fortunately, we had plenty of other physics to discuss, advice to

exchange about getting papers published, this and that. We must have had just about daily

exchanges from January to July, as my diary mentions a day in July when there was no email from

Sue! Anyway, their paper was eventually published, in Foundations of Physics81, and I was glad.

Though not perfect, it was a refreshing new approach and, after all, was so nearly right that I don’t

suppose anyone but myself will ever see the problem!

In December, 1996, something happened that was to change my ideas profoundly – even, to some

extent, exonerating Trevor for his dismissal of my timing ideas. Sue and Barry sent me a copy of a

paper by Alain Aspect and Philippe Grangier82. Here the hand of fate was once more clearly on my

side! The paper was a response to some criticisms by Marshall, Santos and Selleri of the way

Aspect had treated his data in the 1981-2 EPR experiments. What interested me at first reading was

some data comparing two different “coincidence windows”. I thought it might be relevant to my

81 Gilbert, B and S Sulcs, “The measurement problem resolved and local realism preserved via a collapse-free photon

detection model “, Foundations of Physics 26, 1401 (1996)

82 Aspect, A and P Grangier, “About resonant scattering and other hypothetical effects in the Orsay atomic-cascade

experiment tests of Bell inequalities: a discussion and some new experimental data”, Lettere al Nuovo Cimento 43, 345

(1985)

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timing idea, and maybe it was, as they showed that the choice of coincidence window could indeed

affect the answer – something I had been saying for a long time should be checked. There was

also, however, some data on the effect of a data adjustment – a “correction” – he had used, the

“subtraction of accidentals”. I would bear this in mind for further investigation!

Trevor must have seen the paper – it was, after all, written in direct response to one of his own – so

presumably he had decided that Aspect was right and the subtraction was not very important, but

the more I thought about it the more suspicious I became. Eventually, after a few more months

concentrating on timing and failing to find anyone prepared to do the experiments I thought needed,

I came back to it. I had a copy of that all-important thesis! There was very little raw data in it –

obviously what we needed was examples of data before and after “correction” – but even with no

new data, I was inspired to have a really hard look at how Aspect had justified what he had done.

The justification turned out to rest on the assumption that all the atoms in his source were acting

independently. And there could be no doubt about it: it would always increase the test statistic,

increasing the chance of infringing the Bell test. If it was not justified – if those atoms were not

sending out their pairs of “photons” independently – then this was incredibly bad science! Even if

it was, this was something that should have been discussed openly, in the original papers, not left

till after the event, in a journal – Lettere al Nuovo Cimento – that the press felt free to ignore.

Then I discovered in the thesis a small amount of the real thing: untouched data. There was a table,

presented as an example, and it had not been sorted so it was just a jumble of figures. It was from a

different experiment, though, from the one Aspect and Grangier had discussed in their 1985 paper,

and to me it was clear that it might be more interesting. It was in parts almost illegible, but I

deciphered it as best I could and analysed it, and the truth was revealed: that experiment, at least,

was null and void! The accidentals had been sufficient in themselves to cause the “violation of the

Bell inequality”! Without it, nothing! Aspect would not have had anything interesting to report.

He’d have had the one experiment, it’s true, but it was not the one that caught the attention of John

Bell and the rest of the community. The table I had analysed was from the first of the three, which

was equally uninteresting to the outside world, but the crucial experiment – his last, the eye-

catching one involving fancy switching of detectors during the flight of the “photon” – would

clearly have been just as vulnerable or more so. It would not have “worked” without this data

adjustment, and the world had barely even been informed that it had been done! The papers in

Physical Review Letters had presented it as if it were a fully accepted practice, not even referring to

the fact that Freedman and Clauser had thought it necessary to check that violation still occurred

without it.

It was painful, but I relegated my timing hypothesis to the back burner and – mainly on my own as

Sue and Barry had other commitments – concentrated on accidentals. Not that timing was totally

irrelevant in all experiments, but those accidentals dominated all else. Was there any good reason

to assume atoms acted independently? I didn’t think so. I thought that the source in fact acted

more-or-less as one single unit, emitting light from the field surrounding the atoms rather than from

individual ones, and I was totally unconvinced by Aspect and Grangier’s theoretical reasoning.

Had every experiment, from Aspect onwards, used adjusted data? It seemed quite possible that in

some the adjustment had been done automatically, by the analyzing electronics!

In June 1997, an experiment hit the headlines – the New York Times, Physics World, New

Scientist, the usual set . It was a demonstration of quantum entanglement over a distance of 10 km,

by Nicolas Gisin and others in Geneva, and, guess what? They had adjusted their data. They had

adjusted it a lot!

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15. The Geneva Experiments

Nicolas Gisin and the Hull Confrontation with Francesco De Martini

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all

been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility

of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is

exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth

place of decimals." Albert. A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the

dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, Univ. of Chicago

All roads lead to Rome, they say. In this case, they all led to Geneva. Sue had introduced me to an

Australian philosopher, Jack Smart, who happened to be planning a visit to England to see his

relatives (I managed to meet him later for an afternoon). Jack mentioned the Geneva experiment. I

was taking part in discussions in “sci.physics” on the Internet. It cropped up there. I was also

corresponding with Ian Percival (who, you may remember, I had met in Durham and who had

kindly tried to help with advice on grants). He mentioned it – he is a friend of Nicolas Gisin, one of

the team. The New Scientist published a short article. One way or another I found myself studying

the paper – it was available in the Los Alamos archive83.

This Geneva experiment was not easy to understand compared to Aspect’s, but I had had little

training: it was very like some of John Rarity’s. They produced pairs of “photons” at one point,

then sent them down fibre cables, across country, partly under Lake Geneva, to two villages, each

about 10 km away. The signals were put through a fancy kind of interferometer – a device in

which the beam is split and recombined so that you get an interference pattern as you vary the

difference in path lengths of the split beams. At least, you would get a pattern if your light was

monochromatic. (Do I also need to say that it also has to be all of the same “phase set”, as I

discussed in relation to induced coherence? It all depends ...) Anyway, the individual

interferometers did not show interference patterns, the obvious explanation being that the beams

must be a mixture of frequencies so that the patterns are washing each other out. If you send your

detector output, however (which you organize to be a 0 or a 1 signal) along an ordinary electric

wire back to base, and compare it with the signal from the other village, you do get a pattern.

Considering all might have happened en route, you get an amazingly strong one. How has this

happened?

They, the quantum opticians, say they are seeing nonlocal entanglement. The photons are

influencing each other in a manner unknown, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics that declare

that this is simply something that happens. Joint wave functions collapse and “quantum

information” is traveling from one station to the other. I say otherwise. Trevor and the other

realists, of course, automatically say otherwise, but I have not been able to persuade them to look

hard at the real experiment. They dismiss it in one fell swoop: the “detection loophole” is wide

open – nobody ever pretended it was closed – so nothing more need be said.

But, Oh Yes, I think there is more to be said! For one thing, I’ve looked at the graph and observed

that it is the subtraction of accidentals that is the immediate cause of the high “visibility” that they

are using as evidence of entanglement, so the detection loophole is probably irrelevant. For

another, this experiment might be the clue to some new physics, with positive instead of negative

correlations and in line with my induced coherence ideas.

83 Tittel, W, J Brendel, B Gisin, T Herzog and N Gisin, “Experimental demonstration of quantum-correlations over

more than 10 kilometers”, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9707042, revised and published as Physical Review A 57,

3229 (1998)

Caroline H Thompson

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The correlations can be explained most easily if the accepted wisdom is upside down. The

source is light that emerges from a “nonlinear crystal” when it is “pumped” by a laser beam.

Accepted wisdom says this comes in “conjugate pairs” of photons, i.e. ones whose

frequencies add exactly to that of the pump laser. This may sometimes be the case, but, as

before with the induced coherence matter, we are not dealing with the general case but the

“degenerate” one. The two photons are the same frequency.

Now the quantum opticians argue that they cannot possibly be of pure frequencies and there

must be small discrepancies. They must still be “conjugate”, so that one has a small positive

discrepancy and its partner an equal and opposite one. I say nobody has proved this!

Things would be infinitely easier to understand if the frequencies really were identical. The

correlations would then be positive, not negative, and this would mean that it did not matter

that the center frequency, about which the discrepancies were supposed to vary, was itself

variable! The center frequency was supposed to be exactly half the pump frequency, and

this had wide “dispersion”. In other words, under my own private interpretation at least

(and I still have not seen any evidence to contradict it) the center frequency would have been

variable. My interpretation, as I explained in the chapter on induced coherence, is that each

pump pulse would have been of an effectively pure frequency, but this would have differed

randomly from one to the next.

It is surprisingly difficult in practice to tell the difference, though, between a positive and a

negative correlation. Quantum theory is happy with the negative idea; I don’t think Trevor

and his group have put enough thought into the matter. They have gone along with it,

accepting much of the same mathematics.

So, of course, true to form, I start writing to everyone. I obtain Gisin’s email address, and write to

him. At some point I write to Wolfgang Tittel, his Head of Department, as well. And also, at some

point, I receive the list of people expected at the next annual conference on problems in

fundamental physics. Gisin is on it! If we meet face to face, surely I shall be able to convince him

that he is not seeing any magical quantum effect? Surely, too, he will see that he could be wrong

about the correlations being negative? The meeting was to be in September, but I’d fixed on the

title for my talk way back in January: “The "Photon": a 20th century mistake?” What would he

make of that?

That summer I exchanged several messages with Gisin and Tittel. I found their replies to my

questions, though, rather less than helpful, and often disconcerting. Did they really know anything

about Bell tests? I have one of Gisin’s replies here, dated July 6, 1997. It starts:

I am indeed looking forward to meet you!

I am very well aware of the "detection loophole" and I would like to have

your opinion on the following idea. Our next experiments aims to use fast

switches, so that the 2 analyses are really space-like separated. In

principle this requires the use of fast optical switches. This, however,

has no effect on the detection loophole. In other words we all have to

live with the detection loophole, i.e. with the logical possibility that

the photon may "decide" whether or not to be detected. Now the idea is as

follows: since the photon may choose its way (i.e. either be detected or

not), one may as well replace the active switch by a passive beam splitter

and only actively select one detector or the other.

It was warm and friendly, yet he had gone off on a side track. He was, I think, assuming quantum

theory to be true and consequently interested in investigating how this (in my view purely fictitious)

effect really worked – a contradiction in terms, I fear. He had no interest in the Bell test itself –

how the loophole actually affected its validity – only with how Nature could organize correlations

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that infringed it. Which, of course, they don’t! He was, and still is (he’s recently published more

on this line84) devoting his life to the modern equivalent of the study of the numbers of angels who

can dance on the head of a pin!

I’ll tell you what I had written and perhaps you will see my point: we were not communicating very

effectively!

We shall be meeting, I hope, in Hull in September, but I've just been told

about a New Scientist article (June 28, p16) in which you announce the

result of an EPR experiment over 10 km. I think you may be very

interested in what I have been finding out. I've just got back from a

conference in Athens, at which my latest findings were not disputed.

Basically, all infringements of Bell inequalities are due to failures of

the assumptions or to unjustifiable adjustments to the data. I presented

in Athens a study of Aspect's first EPR experiment, in which the

subtraction of "accidentals" makes all the difference. I have ideas on

the nature of the atomic cascade source that would imply that the

"correction" was very much too great. Santos has written that it should

*never* be applied. And there are, of course, other "loopholes", on which

subject I have recently had some interesting correspondence (indirectly,

through the editors of PRL) with Franck Laloe.

The Bell test of Aspect's first experiment was what I call the CHSH one,

in which you have terms that depend on removal of polarisers as well as

those with both present.

I should be extremely interested to know what Bell test you used. I

imagine it was what I term the "standard" one, of form -2 LE S LE 2? I

also presume that you used a PDC source. My first paper, "The Chaotic

Ball ..." (Found Phys Lett 9, 357 (1996)) explains why the standard test

is meaningless. To make it meaningful you need to (a) refrain from

subtracting accidentals and (b) *prove* that the total of the counts in

the two channels is (for each wing of the experiment separately)

independent of your "hidden variable". (b) has to apply to the *subset*

of the photons that have the potential to enter into coincidences, i.e. it

must exclude any unmatched signals. I do not think such a proof is

possible. It is not even clear in recent experiments arising from

Zeilinger's lab what the hidden variable in these experiments actually is.

It is described (I am presuming your experiment is of this same type) as

polarisation, but there could also be elements of phase and frequency.

In Athens I met Ramon Risco Delgado, who has contacts with Innsbruck. He

seems very interested in my work, and I am hoping through him to get some

new ideas on PDC investigated. He seemed to think that, even when the

experiment uses pulsed laser pump beams, "accidentals" are subtracted.

This would seem quite crazy to me.

If you let me have your address I can send you copies of my papers, or you

can download them from my Web site (see below). I do hope you do not feel

my criticisms personally. I am all too aware that these experiments have

caused the evolution of experimental methods all of their own, for which

you are in no way responsible. Even in Aspect's time, much of what he did

was established procedure (I have, by the way, studied his PhD thesis,

which few others - especially theorists- seem to have done).

Looking forward to hearing from you, and receiving copies of your

preprints?

84 Gisin N, V Scarani, W Tittel, H Zbinden,“Optical tests of quantum nonlocality: from EPR-Bell tests towards

experiments with moving observers”, http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0009055 (2000)

Caroline H Thompson

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Caroline

(I see that I mention the Athens conference. I’ll come back to that.)

The thing about Aspect’s accidentals is that they can almost be eliminated, so that you then don’t

have to worry about them. He knew this – he explained it all in his thesis. All he had to do was re-

run the experiments with lower intensities or with less sensitive detectors. There is a voltage he

could have adjusted to do this in an instant. Of course, it would have meant slightly longer running

times to get enough coincidences to analyse, but this was not really a problem.

In fact, very recently (November 2000) I have had some correspondence with Philippe Grangier

(one of Aspect’s collaborators) and he pointed out that they did do some extra runs to get data for

that 1985 paper. What a pity they chose the two-channel one and not one of the other two (they’d

chosen the one that was also sensitive to the detection loophole)! When I tried to discuss this, all he

could do was to repeat the standard liturgy: he has faith that the new experiment currently being

conducted by Edwin Fry et al. will close the detection loophole and settle the matter once and for

all. Hmmm ...

But I was not sure it was that easy to reduce accidentals in Tittel’s experiment. Tittel himself said

in a message in August:

Indeed, we aim to repeat the experiment with some modifications. One of

them will be to lower the accidentals. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that

it will be possible to do an experiment without subtracting them (due to

thermal noise of the Ge-APDs and losses in the connecting fibers). But

we'll do our best.

So much for rationality! What he meant was, presumably, that he did not expect to infringe a Bell

test unless he first did the subtraction. In an earlier message that he had told me:

Even if it seems quite reasonable to me that accidental coincidences are

distributed uniformly, I agree with you that subtraction has to be avoided

for a final test of the Bell-Inequality.

In the event, they did later repeat the experiment85 (they even quoted a paper of mine86) and they

didn’t need to subtract accidentals, but they did not repeat it identically, and I am sure that they

introduced a few other loopholes on the way. They had a different detection system, a two-channel

one. The detection loophole would have been as wide as ever.

But I still cannot tell exactly what happened. It remains a matter of my faith versus theirs, but it is

not a fair contest! I have not been able to find answers to some of the technical questions I’ve

asked. They did seem to be trying to be helpful. Tittel said in one message “it is nice to see that

you did not lose interest in our experiments”, and I seem to remember that in another he (or maybe

another quantum optician) went as far as to say how good it was that people like myself were

keeping them on the straight and narrow. But this was not real communication: they were

answering the easy questions and ignoring the controversial.

85 Tittel, W et al., “Violation of Bell inequalities by photons more than 10 km apart”, Physical Review Letters 81, 3563

(1998) http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9806043; Tittel, W et al., “Long-distance Bell-type tests using energy-time

entangled photons”, http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9809025

86 Thompson, C H, “Timing, "accidentals" and other artifacts in EPR experiments”, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-

ph/9711044

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A face to face discussion would be different, though? I carried on in hope, delaying my next

publication attempt till after our meeting. Perhaps we could even write a joint paper? That would

really be something! In a logical world, that is what should have happened.

September came, and I arrived in Hull. I was not sure I was looking forward to this conference –

none of my friends would be there. I had called on Trevor and Natalie on the way up (despite

everything, we were still friends) but there was no way he would voluntarily have gone to one of

these meetings! I wonder if it was at one of them that the great rift between him and Franco Selleri

opened?

Anyway, this time my forebodings were justified. The group seemed to have consolidated its ideas.

More were now committed to developing “quantum computing”, and you can’t have interesting,

fund-attracting quantum computing without the glamour, the nonlocal entanglement. As I’ve tried

from the start to persuade them, the correlations they obtain are fascinating. With the right

approach, I expect fund-providers could be persuaded of this and the exact same experiments could

continue to be done but under a different heading, but I suppose one can’t blame them for feeling

that this is risky. Jobs might well vanish along with the weirdness.

Well, I did meet Gisin. We had about 20 minutes conversation one dinner time. I liked him, but I

fear our actual communication was no better than by email. We began to discuss how one might try

and settle the matter of whether the correlations were positive or negative, but did not get far. I did

not think his suggestion practical, or very likely I didn’t quite understand it, but the main thing was

the he quite clearly was more interested in the theory – his theory – than in experimental details.

He had a perfectly adequate one, complete with impressive formulae and giving the correct

“predictions” (so long as you kept to his rules!), so why should he be interested in challenging it?

Understandably, he preferred to spend his free time talking Bohm-De Broglie theory or collapsing

wave functions with Lucien Hardy and Chris Dewdney, not being pestered by an enthusiastic

realist!

Oh to be back in the 1930’s or so! I’ve recently read C P Snow’s “The Two Cultures”87, a later

edition published in 1963. In those days he still seems to have thought of scientists as the good and

the brave, the people with a mission to find out the truth, the people who believed in themselves and

their destiny as saviours of the human race! He quoted Rutherford’s “This is the heroic age of

science!” If one is talking about the scientists at East Malling, quietly and conscientiously trying to

find out how to grow better fruit, then that is another matter, though they would be the first to admit

that their chance of contributing anything critical to our survival is slim. Assuredly so far as

quantum optics is concerned, though, the heroic age is now ended. Few, if any, of the scientists I

had encountered deserved Snow’s admiration as people with a mission to find out the truth,

constructing the “most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man”. Or am I

wrong? In their own eyes, maybe the have constructed something beautiful – a mathematical

theory. They just don’t happen to have made sure to my satisfaction that it tallies with the real

world. As Snow would have put it, the “automatic corrective” in science, which he was able to

assume ensured that its “misguided periods” did not last too long, has failed.

* * * * * * * *

[11:11:00]

What else happened at Hull? Well, I had an absurd debate with a young student from Oxford,

lasting about two hours, and cannot now remember anything about it except the impression that this

was the ultimate in decadence! I met one or two people who still talked sense – Peter Landsberg,

87 Snow, C P, The Two Cultures, & A Second Look, Cambridge University Press 1959

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D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 71

for example, who was by then retired but had written a book on thermodynamics and encouraged

me in my idea of writing my story. And, of course, I gave my talk.

It was lively, to say the least! Near the beginning, I had put on a slide a statement that these EPR

experiments were not good science, and a certain member of the audience interrupted. He leapt to

his feet and boomed out that I couldn’t say that! It was Francesco de Martini, who, as I soon found

out, was currently doing experiments with Lucien Hardy in Rome88. I stood my ground! “Yes, I

could and did say that. This conference was dedicated to the memory of Euan Squires. He would

have wanted me to say that!” Things were quite noisy for a while, but between me and the

chairman full scale riot was avoided and I continued. In Lucien’s talk, it emerged that their

experiment had not involved data adjustment, but he joked in the discussion afterwards that it did

have a loophole. He knew that I would be able to find it, but was not going to give me any clues!

And this was supposed to be science? I later had much vigorous debate in sci.physics over the fact

that the theory behind Lucien’s experiment included a totally absurd assumption – essentially the

detection loophole in its widest, most flagrant, form. He himself, though, has shown no interest in

discussing the matter. To be fair, he did respond in general terms to a recent message of mine. He

wrote (November 6, 2000):

I disagree with you that nonlocality is illogical or irrational. For something to be illogical

or irrational it has to be impossible to even imagine it happening. But we can imagine

nonlocality. Anything we can imagine is possible in the widest sense of the word.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Even though I disagree with you I think it is good that

somebody is putting the local realist cause. This will encourage experimentalists to perform

a deciding experiment.

Incidentally, Francesco de Martini and I parted with no hard feelings.

88 Boschi, D, S Branca, F De Martini and L Hardy, “Ladder Proof of Nonlocality without Inequalities: Theoretical and

Experimental Results”, Physical Review Letters 79, 2755 (1997)

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16. Fun on the Internet

I found an audience – and got flung out of a discussion group!

“The scientific community is like a pack of hounds, as often following a false

scent as the true one.” Elderly physicist at one of the Solvay conferences, cc

1925

Was it “fun”? Well, “exciting” maybe – I have never got over the novelty of communicating across

the globe. An outlet – at least someone to talk to – but internet discussions are only now becoming

really constructive. The problem is that most people who want to talk physics have absorbed

almost all of the accepted dogma ...

I had been slow off the mark in joining the Internet. Perhaps this was just as well as my diaries

show that I was up to my ears educating myself in the library, writing to contacts from conferences

etc.. and continuing a pretty regular email exchange with Sue Sulcs. It was not until November

1996, after the Oxford conference, that I put my first document in the Los Alamos quantum physics

archive (my Chaotic Ball paper, which was at last in print). Only a few people commented on it,

which was a disappointment. Evidently it would take more than that to reach the world.

That fund of information, the New Scientist, had started publicising useful web links, and they gave

the address of a physics discussion group. “We’re off!” I thought! Surely if I tell these real live

people – people who presumably have no special axe to grind in the EPR area – the truth they will

be fascinated and want to join me in proclaiming it to the world! I sent an opening message,

sketching out what I’d found and even putting in something about hoping I’d be able to cope with

the flood of replies. There were a few, but they showed little enthusiasm.

Frustration grew as they nattered on about this and that, quoting one falsehood after another about

the “photon”, relativity theory or whatever. After a few weeks I could take it no longer! I told

them what I thought – and they flung me out! It turned out that this was a “moderated” group, and I

suppose I ought to have found out who the moderator was. I expect he was one of the people I

specifically criticized. He could have warned me, though. I felt I had been kicked in the face –

stoned as a martyr, if one wants a dramatic image of the situation. Out of the blue, I received a

message saying that I had been “unsubscribed”, and of course that meant I could not shout back and

object: my messages would automatically be banned. There was just one member of the group who

seemed slightly less indoctrinated than the rest and I wrote direct to him to ask what was going on.

His support carried me through what was otherwise one of the all-time low points of my life.

I soldiered on. In May, 1997, I started my web site. It was nothing glorious, just a list of my papers

and a few comments. Again, nothing much happened. I had not found out how to get it onto the

search engines. Never mind, though: that year was busy enough, what with my “accidentals”

discovery, two conferences (in Athens and Hull – where does Athens fit into my story? It was a

tremendous boost to my morale to be invited, and that by my good friend Franco Selleri.),

submitting papers to two other conferences that I was unable to attend, submitting a paper to

Physical Review Letters, writing to New Scientist and Physics World to spread the gospel about

nonlocality, not to mention trying for jobs and/or a PhD. I had a brief encounter with one of the

regular, unmoderated, newsgroups.

My friend Ray Tomes told me about a discussion going on about the Geneva experiment, and of

course I couldn’t resist saying my piece. I knew what I was talking about, of course. I’d seen that

graph and seen that the whole thing would have fallen flat if they hadn’t subtracted accidentals, and

some people listened. Yes, this was beginning to be fun, but it was also disheartening and

frustrating. There were tactics. There were the tricks, such as raking up a message from way back

Caroline H Thompson

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and “responding” to it as if I had not already answered the point. The aim, you see, is to get the last

word, so, as I gradually discovered, the regular contributors – some I’d sure must be paid to present

the official physics line – can do this, in the expectation that the people like myself who really have

something to say will run out of stamina.

And there were a few people who were just plain ignorant, who would tell me, for example, that I

“hadn’t said a word of truth”. This was sci.physics, though, so I probably could not actually be

flung out so long as I kept my language clean and so on. I persevered for long enough for at least

one of the “establishment” to realize that I did know what I was talking about. He has written to me

for factual advice from time to time, and even supported my case once by pointing out that one of

my quant-ph papers had actually been cited by the Geneva people in one of theirs.

Sorry, this is not an inspiring chapter! Let’s move on to Athens. That really was fun.

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17. Athens and the world of “relativity”

Where Maxwell went wrong, as well as Einstein. This is where I belong,

with Kelly and Arp and Assis and Pappas ...

How did I come to be invited to a conference on “relativity”? I had never written anything on the

subject. Quite honestly, I regarded it as boring: my universe had an aether and everything that

existed was defined relative to that, but there was nothing much more to be said! Still, my good

friend Franco had invited me, and when I demurred, saying I might feel out of place, he said I could

give a paper on the Bell tests if I wanted. Besides, by that time (1997) I had already decided that I

must write books, and meeting the “relativity” group of “dissidents” could not fail to give me

valuable material.

Perhaps I shall this time gloss over what to me was a tremendous barrier: my phobia about

traveling. Some kind person (Trevor Marshall, actually) had made this even worse by mentioning

the way taxi drivers were likely to overcharge me from the airport! The promised rewards –

meeting Franco again, and meeting up with one of my email correspondents, Werner Hofer – pulled

me through. One very hot afternoon I arrived in the centre of Athens, having come by bus from the

airport, chaperoned by George and Judy Horton, and Chris and Glenys Dewdney. After a short tour

of the town in a taxi that we suspected ought to have known that our hotel was just around the

corner, we arrived. The party was spread among several hotels, but mine was in the old town,

below the Acropolis.

I did not feel out of place at all! When I first started contacting physicists, I used to apologise for

the rustiness of my mathematics and explain that I could only use common sense concepts and

ordinary language, but in point of fact it seems that my mathematics is, in many areas, as good as or

better than most physicists! Not that that was relevant in the conference talks or in private

conversation: physicists, when it comes to it, communicate mainly just like you and me. That first

evening it was not hard to identify them, but this was by the way they brandished their programs,

not by any other special “physicist” look.

One very human physicist was my email friend, Werner. He did not arrive till about the second

day. I and some others were sitting outside having an evening meal when this strapping young lad

in shorts turned up and introduced himself. Werner is not that young, but all the same I felt

flattered that he should give me his attention. He proved to be the perfect gentleman, escorting me

on several occasions on walks around the town – and I did need an escort! I simply could not get to

grips with the geography of the place. I would not even have been able to find the conference site

on my own, whereas Werner seemed to be instantly expert.

Anyway, we had much enjoyable discussion, largely about physics. His work has to do with

“scanning tunneling microscopes”, dealing with electrons and atoms in conditions that strain

quantum theory to its limits and beyond. After all, if you are manipulating individual atoms it is

rather obvious that a theory that gives you only the probability of finding one in a particular place is

not adequate. Several years earlier I had read Von Baeyer’s book, “Taming of the Atom”89, and

found this impressive evidence against quantum theory. As he said, (p56)

... we have succeeded in magnifying atoms to our size so that we can see and manipulate

them. And what we see is not so different from what we imagined all along.

89 Baeyer, Hans Christian Von, Taming the Atom, Viking, 1992

Caroline H Thompson

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I had been hoping also to get him interested in Aspect’s actual experiments, and to this end had

asked Franco to bring a copy of his thesis with him. Werner would have no difficulty with the

French and might have been able to check that proof of a modified test that I felt was suspect90.

This did not quite work out. Somehow other people always have their own agendas and, besides, I

never quite recovered sufficiently from the stress of the journey, the battle with the air-conditioning

in my room, and the exhaustion that I invariably experience after concentrating one challenging

paper after another! Another mathematically and linguistically qualified person I tried to interest in

the subject was Waldyr Rodrigues, also present at this conference, though it was not till the Storrs

meeting in June 2000 that we had much conversation.

And those papers were challenging! I had no idea just how much of modern physics was suspect! I

had assumed that, despite something disturbing I’d read about lack of agreement over the “Biot-

Savart Law”91, Maxwell had just about buttoned up the theory of electromagnetism, but now here

were people such as André Assis telling me he’d got some of it wrong. Panos Pappas demonstrated

an actual machine that he said Maxwell’s theory disallowed! I did not understand the machine, and

still do not, but I’m pretty sure they’re right.

I did (almost) understand quite a lot of the “relativity” arguments, in particular Franco Selleri’s

paper. He had found that the theory predicted an obviously impossible discontinuity if you tried to

apply it to a revolving disc. I’m not sure I really knew what I was talking about, but I remember

discussing it with Assis for the duration of quite a long walk.

I like discussing physics! Perhaps it is after all not so surprising that I was unable to learn the

geography of the town: wherever I went I was busy discussing, oblivious sometimes to traffic as

well as everything else. At one point I remember a heated discussion (the weather as well as the

subject) with José Croca, who challenges some of quantum theory but not too vigorously. He was

asking why I could not accept his ideas (I can’t remember what they were) and why I should be

trying to “spoil” his project. I expect I got on my high horse about the quest for the truth.

Whatever it was, he had to pull me back from the traffic, which was surging forth when the lights

changed.

The conference was a turning-point for me. My own talk came late in the proceedings and attracted

little response, but I did not feel this mattered. I did not realize it at the time, but it was here that it

began to dawn on me that my own ideas on phi-waves and the aether might have value. Again and

again I found speakers trying to deduce from mathematics, largely building on that written down

over a century ago by Maxwell, explanations for subtle effects that had been accumulating as

unsolved puzzles. It was clear that the theory was inadequate in a range of matters concerning

rotational motion, with possible rotations of the aether (I later found these came under the heading

of “torsion fields”) and possible relationships with circular polarization of light and with

magnetism. By the time of my next major conference (in Storrs) I had had a brief encounter with

Myron Evans (who, incidentally, used to live in Wales and whose career had never recovered after

an episode at Aberystwyth University in which the department he was working in was closed down)

90 Aspect, on pp 124-127 of his thesis, derives a modified Bell test that allows, he thinks, for non-detections. It takes

account of what he calls “dissymmetry”, the fact that the total number of coincidences varies slightly with polarization

direction. I feel that there is a fatal flaw in his argument – that effectively he assumes that no individual value in a

distribution exceeds the mean – and that his resulting test led him to seriously underestimate the likely effect of the

detection loophole on his test. Thus he thought the correction needed was very small. He therefore felt justified in

publishing in his report of the two-channel experiment (the first 1982 paper) the result of the unmodified test, with just

a mention in a footnote of the existence of a more appropriate test, details of which would be published later. He felt, I

would presume, that he had shown that the modification was unnecessary in practice, even with low-efficiency

detectors. Others subsequently have used the same unmodified test, following his lead. Thus, as I think, a minor error

in a PhD thesis that happened to go unnoticed may be responsible for the whole nonlocality charade!

91 Tricker, R A R, “Early Electrodynamics”, Pergamon (1965)

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and his B(3) theory, “inverse Faraday effect” and such like. My phi-waves came to seem more real,

more necessary, as a means of sifting the mathematical wheat from the chaff.

The conference hall was big, air-conditioned to the point where we were actually cold, and

conducive to concentration. The meals were best, though, with no formal arrangements, just pizzas

or whatever out in the open. I met Al Kelly and had great discussions about gravity, levitating

gyroscopes and the like. I met Halton Arp, of quasar notoriety, and Tom van Flandern, with his

knowledge of the Global Positioning Satellites. Einstein had made such a fuss about the problem of

synchronizing distant clocks, but here was Tom telling us that we managed to synchronise the

satellites perfectly satisfactorily. In practice they can all be treated as if synchronized with an

imaginary clock placed at the centre of the earth. Anyway, this was my first introduction to these

people, who are now part of my life. We have since had our arguments!

Now Franco is still a bit of an enigma! He undoubtedly encourages me, and has contributed greatly

to my education. He had in fact prepared me fairly well for this conference, whose daunting title

was “Relativistic Physics and Some of its Applications”. He had given me in Bari those Sagnac

papers – papers that showed that it was by no means reasonable to take Einstein’s dictum at face

value and assume that light at all times traveled at speed c relative to the observer. Sagnac’s

experiments showed that when it was sent around a circuit on a revolving platform its speed was

more closely related to that of the lab than that of the platform, despite the fact that it was

“observed” by means of an interference fringe formed on the platform. He had introduced me, on

that long walk in Durham in which we had lost sight of our landmark – the cathedral spire – and

had to ask the way back – to ideas about quasars and the almost-established fact that their red shifts

tend to be “quantised”. These I was now able to identify as being due to Halton Arp, so that I was

conditioned to be impressed by his talk. Very recently I have been lent a book presenting the other

side of the story92 . Much of the evidence for associations of quasars with known galaxies has

subsequently been shown to be questionable, perhaps explainable in terms of mistakes and artifacts.

Though I’m with Arp in thinking that the cosmological red shift is largely due to “non-velocity”

effects, i.e. to causes other than Doppler shift, and that the universe is unlikely to be expanding, I

am keeping an open mind about what quasars are and how they relate to the evolution of galaxies.

But to return to Franco, can I get him to accept the wave theory of light? My talk in Athens was

entitled “Behind the Scenes at the EPR Magic Show” (now printed in the proceedings93, which

includes quite a number of worthwhile articles) but he knew and did not object to the fact that I had

recently sent a paper called “Against the quantisation of light” to a conference in San Francisco ( I

believe this is around on the Internet somewhere – my friend Ray Tomes was in charge and I know

one or two people have actually seen it ...). Anyway, I have tried several times now (in 2000 in

Storrs as well as at earlier meetings) to discuss the nature of light, and each time he has avoided any

depth, tending to change the subject. In Athens we had most marvelous evening meals in the open

air at a restaurant beneath the Acropolis, and one evening I manoeuvered a place next to him. I

tried to get him onto the subject, but he evaded it. He would have liked me to take an interest in his

own latest ideas, which concerned EPR-type experiments using “neutral kaons”. I have since tried

to understand several of his papers on the subject (the latest being one in 1999 with R Foadi94), but

they are too indirect! It seemed to me that they were assuming a lot of theory, and an important

aspect of it was that they were deducing the presence of some kaon or other from the absence of

detections! This did not sound the kind of material you could depend on: if you don’t see

92 Field, Geoge B, Halton Arp and John N Bahcall, “The Redshift Controversy”, Frontiers in Physics, W A Benjamin,

Inc., Reading, Massachusetts 1973

93 Selleri, Franco, “Open Questions in Relativistic Physics”, Apeiron, Montreal 1998

94 Foadi, R and F Selleri, “Quantum mechanics versus local realism for neutral kaon pairs”, Physical Review A, 61,

012106 (1999)

Caroline H Thompson

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something then it may be because it was cancelled out by destructive interference or it may be that

it was not there in the first place. Anyway, all he would say about his ideas on light was that he

had published many papers and books now, all supporting the Bohm-de Broglie model, which

treated light as particles. He could not simply throw all this away! (In this, I think he and the late

Euan Squires are in the same boat. How many others, one wonders?) Back in 1995 in Bari what he

had said was that he felt that the way light was detected was evidence for its particle nature. He

was convinced that there was experimental evidence, for example, that if you placed several

detectors around a source that was emitting just one photon at time you would never get more than

one detector firing at a time. And of course, in his career as a particle physicist, he may have seen

situations in which this was so! He would have dealt with high-energy radiation. My point is that

the ordinary light by which we read is much lower energy and behaves in a much more wavelike

manner. It will spread more, unless carefully focussed. If it can be detected by one

photomultiplier, then it will occasionally be detected by more than one. I’m just not sure now what

he really believes. Perhaps if I were able to produce positive evidence in favour of the pure wave

idea he would in fact be pleased. Can I take his suggestion, made at the Storrs conference, that I

contact Yanhua Shih about doing “my” experiments, as evidence of this?

There were other memorable moments, now coming back to me as I write. There was Pappas and

his electromagnetic machine. I’d have liked to have had him explain it to me, and he had invited

me to join him with a small group in some excursion on the final Saturday afternoon. Somehow I

missed the rendez-vous, and spent the time instead talking to Patrick Flemming in a very hot hotel

vestibule. There was the young Spanish heart-throb, Ramon Risco-Delgardo, a former student of

Trevor Marshall and Emilio Santos. Events are confused now in my mind, but I clearly remember

one evening meal when I drew what I thought were important diagrams for him on a table napkin,

in the best tradition of the mad physicist! I had hopes that I had managed to get a convert to my pet

ideas on timing in Aspect’s experiments – ideas that, though partly eclipsed by my new “accidental

subtraction” ones, I still felt to be valid. I still to this day smart slightly at the fact that Trevor has

never listened to my explanation. Anyway, Ramon seemed to follow, but he never responded to

subsequent email.

And of course there was Werner. A group of us were walking back after one of those meals

beneath the Acropolis, chatting partly about ordinary things – some of the wives were getting at me

for my lack of languages, trying to persuade me that I should at least attempt Italian. Werner was

clearly restless, but I’m afraid he found no takers he suggested exploring the night life!

On the final Sunday, I did what I should have done at the outset: bought a map. With great courage

I set forth and ventured on my own as far as the nearest park, where an open-air chamber music

concert entertained me. I think I could just about have managed the trip to the airport on my own,

too, but I had company on the bus (no need for a taxi: it was easy walking distance). I felt quite a

woman of the world, chatting to a stranger in the airport lounge about my physics. She hoped one

day to hear my name among the ranks of the famous.

Four years on, at Storrs, and the prospect of that, or indeed of my work having any actual impact on

the beliefs of the establishment, seemed as dim as ever. Or was there a glimmer of hope? Is it

significant that Abner Shimony, co-author of a much-cited paper on modifications to the Bell test,

carefully avoids stating in his recent article on Bell95 that the experiments provided irrefutable

evidence for quantum theory? He wrote:

Most of the experimental results were conservative, in that they strongly supported quantum

mechanics and disconfirmed the implications of the local hidden variables theories, but

95 Jackiw, R. and A. Shimony, The Depth and Breadth of John Bell's Physics, http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0105046

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whatever the results might have been the experiments surprised the physics community by

showing that hypotheses about hidden variables and locality, generally considered to be

philosophical since the famous Einstein-Bohr debate [16, 17], were amenable to empirical

investigation. “Bell's Theorem" became a topic in the guide to authors of the American

Institute of Physics, and interest in the Theorem spread to philosophers and(unfortunately

with frequent exaggeration and distortion) to the general public.

I obtained in introduction to Shimony through his friend Dick Hazelett, who I met at Storrs, and had

had some correspondence with him in the period when he must have been preparing this article. I

wrote the other day asking if I could include substantial parts of it as an Appendix, and he said

“Certainly!”

[Later, in about 2004, he contributed a page on Bell’s Theorem to Stanford University’s online

encylopaedia. In this actually quoted one of my papers. There were, incidentally, many typos in

his original article. I wrote to him pointing some of them out and worked with him for a week or

two correcting them. I wanted to get it right so that I could quote it in another encylopaedia:

“Wikipedia”. See Ch. ???.]

Caroline H Thompson

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18. The Nature of Light

Summary of my ideas on light, and historical reasons why others are in an impasse. Some results of

research, 1993-2005

“All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the

answer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick

and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.” Einstein, in letter to

Michael Besso, 12 December 1951

December 2005

This chapter is mainly about the results of my researches into general physics, rather than my

adventures interacting with others. In point of fact many adventures were involved, from the

revelation at the 1997 conference in Oxford that the Michelson-Morley experiments were not as

null as the text books say, to confrontations in newsgroups on the internet, presentation at a

conference in Brighton, and email encounters with like minds such as Eric Reiter. The Oxford

conference it already covered. The others I shall come to later.

As I said, the Athens conference set me thinking that my own ideas on fundamental physics were,

after all, worth telling to the world. Somehow I seem to have grasped the nature of light, and it is

really so straightforward. Possibly the most important area where others have gone wrong is in

taking too much notice of the fact that at least some light can be polarized. It was realised that it

was some kind of a wave, but they got the impression that all light was polarized, which meant that

it was always a transverse wave, oscillating from side to side or up and down like surface water

waves. Yes, it can often be polarized, but you can get the effect of a transverse wave if you take a

source producing longitudinal waves and move it from side to side (see Gabriel Lafrenière’s

animation), and longitudinal waves are very much less demanding than transverse ones as regards

the medium in which they can propagate.

The waves actually produced by the source need to be at a higher frequency than the side to side

motions to see the effect.

[Insert LaFrenière diagram as per PWA.doc]

What could be simpler? Unfortunately, though, this picture is unlikely ever to be directly testable,

since the high frequency waves are unlikely to be detectable.

Over the years I have developed a fairly complete Theory of Everything that is all based on the

idea, and in this I suggest that very high frequency pulsation is a feature of all solid matter. It

would be most inconvenient if the resulting waves could themselves be detected! They would

saturate every instrument, masking detection of the frequencies of interest, which are the ones that

carry radiation and hence measurable “energy”. My theory is one based on a very smooth,

featureless, fluid aether – smooth other than the fact that its one and only property, which I have

christened “phi”, tends to flow in waves. The whole theory I call the “phi-wave aether” (PWA)

theory. The aether of open space is smooth, but “solid matter” is formed where the local intensity

of the phi-waves happens to be greater than some natural threshold, causing it to change state and

become, at least temporarily, a pulsating “wave center”.

[19:12:05] I shall not delve into the intricacies of the PWA theory here. It is covered by a couple of

my essays in appendices. Instead let us look into the matter of why others – Maxwell or Lorentz in

the 19th century, say, or Einstein or Bohr in the 20th, did not come up my simple ideas as to the

nature of light.

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The idea of the intrinsically transverse nature of light waves has been a definite handicap ever since

polarisation was discovered in the 17th century. As I said, light may well often have transverse

patterns to it, but in my model they are only patterns. What propagates through the aether are the

longitudinal high-frequency phi-waves (which, incidentally, are not necessary “elastic” ones), and it

is common experience that longitudinal waves can propagate in just about any medium. Transverse

ones can only propagate in an elastic solid, and, to reach the high speed of light, this solid would

have to be almost rigid. Hence the idea of a fixed aether (a solid filling all space cannot flow) and

the Michelson-Morley experiments of around 1890 really do seem to have ruled this out. Maxwell

did not live long enough to know this, though, and theorists were stuck with the fixed aether idea.

After Michelson-Morley, the desperate solution that Einstein adopted in his Special Relativity of

denying that an aether was needed at all was almost unavoidable. The transverse nature of the

waves seemed to mean that the aether was rigid. Experiments showed this to be impossible.

19th century theorists had also been handicapped by lack of information about the atom. Indeed,

some, right into the 20th century, continued to doubt the reality of atoms, let alone attributing to

them the wave-like properties that the quantum theorists discovered. It was probably not until the

mid 1920’s, when Schrödinger and others were playing around with explanations for the “Balmer

series” etc. for the spectrum of atomic hydrogen, that the clues to the existence of high frequency

pulsations emerged. Schrödinger had the idea that, rather than suddenly emitting a particle-like

“photon” at the instant when an electron changed from one state to another, the atom was in fact

producing very high frequency waves at two different frequencies at once (or, which would

probably have come to much the same thing experimentally, two different atoms were producing

the waves) and the two were producing beats, just as an out-of-tune musical instrument can produce

beats relative to a tuning fork96. [Of course this does not quite square with my idea of all wave

centers emitting at the same frequency, but very likely my PWA theory applies in its present form

only to atoms in their rest, ground, state.]

Anyway, to my mind we have here the missing link: we have something oscillating at very high

frequency, much higher than visible light, and who is to say whether it is a transverse oscillation or

a pulsation? After all, it is not, I think, certain that high frequency waves such as gamma rays are

always polarized. X-rays can show a degree of polarization, but was this there at the moment of

emission or is it merely the result of distortion of the pattern when it is reflected at a suitable angle?

What other obstacles confronted the 20th century theorists? Remember they were effectively one

social group, the ones at the cutting edge all meeting periodically at conferences. Einstein seems, I

fear, to have been responsible for two of them. One was the refusal to take notice of the small

effect of “aether wind” of which Michelson and Morley had seen faint signs and that Dayton Miller

later confirmed fairly conclusively97. Einstein was aware of Miller’s experiments and said openly

that if he was right then his Special Relativity (being incompatible with an aether) was wrong98, but

he chose to put the observations down to error. It’s a long story, which I shall leave in the capable

hands of James DeMeo, who has kindly contributed and appendix on the subject. Thus they

thought they ignored possible evidence that there was an aether that did not move at the same speed

everywhere – that was some kind of a fluid. Had they had just a little more imagination, been a

little less constrained in their thoughts by existing mathematical models, they might have

96 Schroedinger, Erwin, “Wave Mechanics: Quantisation and proper values”, Ann. D. Phys. 79, (1926)

97 Miller, Dayton C, “The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth”,

Reviews of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933), http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/cpes/people/cahill_r/Miller1933.pdf

[6 Mb]

98 Einstein, in the "Science" review, 1925: “... if Dr Miller's observations were confirmed, the Theory of Relativity

would be at fault. Experience is the ultimate judge.”

Caroline H Thompson

D:\Documents\Mum\Book\Adventures.DOC, July 27, 2003 81

interpreted even a null result as evidence of aether flow. The most natural interpretation of a null

result is, after all, that the aether moves with the Earth around the Sun, but Lorentz objected to this

idea on theoretical grounds99. It can alternatively be explained, though, by the “relativity” tricks of

contracting lengths and expanding times. Miller’s results, if correct, cannot.

The second Einstein obstacle was the invention of the photon. The photon (particle) model of light

was totally unhelpful in relation to Schödinger’s beat ideas, which seem to have quietly died the

death.

A third obstacle was the success of Maxwell’s equations and the mathematics of his model of light.

Though few would even at the time have taken too seriously his mechanical model in which light

was caused by the interplay of vortices and little ball bearings (he did not take it too seriously

himself100), most practicing physicists have never had any quarrel with his mathematics, or with his

underlying idea in terms of electric fields inducing magnetic fields which in turn induced mode

electric ones. Despite the fact that Maxwell himself would have taken the existence of an aether for

granted, one can (as Einstein discovered) manipulate the mathematics so that there does not seem to

be a need for one. The physics can be made to be the same in all frames of reference, but there is in

reality nothing to compel anyone to do the necessary transformations. One can simply admit that if

not in the aether frame the physics is bound to be more complicated and needs to be worked out

from first principles – the latter, of course, as yet unknown, since to even think of deviating from

Einstein has been regarded as heresy.

Be that as it may (and this matter of a preferred “aether” frame is indeed a tricky one), the

alternatives for the 20th century seem to have been the photon if it’s a particle model you’re after or,

if you want a wave theory, Maxwell’s model. Nobody seems to have seen the need to delve deeper

and produce a model that explains Maxwell. There has been no need to explain how the electric

and magnetic fields work, since we know they do and we know how to derive one from the other.

Which really tells you in advance that one or other is, barring boundary conditions, redundant ...

Just why did Einstein invent the photon? This I shall never understand! I don’t know why he felt

he had to take so much notice of Planck’s black body radiation curve, which the latter had

“explained” in terms of sets of oscillators that could only emit radiation in fixed amounts (energies

always in “quanta”, hν, where h is Planck’s constant and ν the frequency). Planck had made

several assumptions that seem to me to be totally unreasonable. He had, I think, effectively

assumed quantisation at the outset. There was no good scientific reason to take the fact that his

assumption led to the observed curve too seriously. As far as I can see, the curve is simply the

radiation equivalent of the “normal” or “Gaussian” curve of ordinary statistics – a curve that arises

naturally whenever there are data subject to random variations.

Then there was the supposed evidence of quantisation from experiments such as Millikan’s.

Millikan tested Einstein’s formula relating the voltage obtained in the photoelectric effect to the

frequency of the light used, and he found agreement, but he vehemently objected to Einstein’s

interpretation of this in terms of electrons and photons. Had the photon not been invented (as a

result of a certain interpretation of the black body curve, together with Einstein’s Special Relativity

idea), I doubt if anyone would have given a second thought to Einstein here – and maybe at the time

they didn’t.

99 Lorentz, Hendrik A, “Theory of Electrons”, Teubner 1916, pp 169 and 176

100 James Clerk Maxwell, "On Physical Lines of Force", 1861. For selected passages see

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/47c9d2ca1f37c0fb

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Things were to change, though. As I mentioned a while back (Ch. 10), Einstein was catapulted into

movie-star-like status as a result of his claimed correct prediction of the bending of light by the Sun

during the 1919 eclipse. Thereafter, so far as the press was concerned, he could do no wrong! One

might think that the scientific community itself would, collectively, have had more sense, but at the

end of the day one has to obtain funds, and it’s clearly best not to challenge too openly the beliefs

of the fund providers .... Anyway, the photon idea gradually took hold, and this despite very

strong objections by people as influential as Niels Bohr himself, who said at the 1921 Solvay

conference:

“[The hypothesis of light quanta] presents insuperable difficulties when applied to

the explanation of the phenomena of interference ... [it] excludes in principle the

possibility of a rational definition of the conception of a frequency ...” 101

Then Arthur Compton came along with his experiments showing a change in frequency of gamma

rays when passed through certain substances. For Bohr, this seemed to clinch the deal. Photons

and electrons being in vogue, he and Compton interpreted the experiments in terms of photons

hitting electrons, and we’ve been stuck with the idea ever since! Admittedly, the rival explanations

at the time were not so easy to follow102, and I have been unable to come up with a complete one

myself, but to jump from these experiments to the conclusion that all radiation behaved like

particles was in any event completely unjustifiable. Even gamma rays, as a correspondent of mine

(Eric Reiter) has shown experimentally, don’t behave completely like particles. Even they can be

split, the same one being detected more than once103.

I’m afraid I regard the photon as the product of mass delusion. Quite apart from the pernicious part

it has played in interpreting the Bell test experiments, it has been responsible for the apparent

inability of modern physicists to distinguish between energy and frequency. No amount of

smoothing things over via “wave-particle duality” really helps. The photon is a cause of confusion

wherever it crops up.

One major reason the photon has survived so long it that Quantum Mechanics has developed as a

theory of “observables”, or, in other words, what one’s instruments can measure. What an

instrument measures, though, is largely a matter of how it is designed. Design one to count

“photons” and that is what it will appear to do, even if the underlying variable is really a continuous

wave. All that is required is an instrument with some kind of random input and an effective

threshold, so that it clicks whenever the combined input signal and random element exceeds the

threshold. [The idea is related to “loading theory”, a rival idea that was around at the beginning of

the 20th century, as you will find from Eric Reiter’s essays.]

It was Aspect’s thesis, which I had read back in 1995, that confirmed for me the reasonableness of

this idea. As he explains, he could choose the voltage of his “discriminator” at will, and though he

tried to do it objectively, it is clear that there was no unique correct choice. Let me explain a little.

His “photodectors” produced as output voltage pulses, which were, as he said, very variable in size

and shape. The discriminator was a little bit of electronics that decided which pulses to count as

photons, and it did this simply be declaring all with maximum above a set threshold to be photons,

all others just noise. His graph relating counts to threshold showed a levelling off in the middle,

which he regarded as a significant plateau and an indicator of where the threshold ought to be set.

But for one thing the plateau was not quite flat. For another, I suspect that he would have got

101 Hendry, John, “The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue”, D Reidel Publishing Company

1984, p 28

102 Schroedinger, “Collected papers on wave mechanics”, Blackie & Son Ltd., 1928, pp 124-9

103 Eric Reiter, “Experimental demonstration of the fully classical nature of gamma rays”,

http://www.unquantum.com/paper2/Classical%20Gamma-ray%20splitting%20spectroscopy.pdf, 2003

Caroline H Thompson

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different graphs using different manufactures and settings of photodetector. There does not,

incidentally, seem here to have been any serious attempt to relate instrument clicks to the energy of

the input, i.e. there was no check on the idea that a photon should have energy hν.

To return to my own model, there is no way that a wave model can be compatible with a fixed

energy. The energy carried by a phi-wave pattern depends on the clarity of the pattern (related to

the coherence of the wave) as well as to the amplitude of the phi-waves. The idea of the energy

being fixed by the frequency must have arisen from the very high frequency studies of people such

as Moseley in the first decades of the 20th century. It is only recently, with Eric Reiter’s work, that

it has been shown that even these high frequencies, though coming in narrow pulses, are not

particles.

Another important feature of my phi-wave light model is that it deals smoothly (as with Maxwell’s

model) with interference effects. When two similar light waves are superposed, the pattern will be

strengthened in some places, destroyed in others, though the phi-wave themselves will mostly carry

on regardless. I visualise them not as sinusoidal waves but as a succession very short pulses with

gaps in between, so that one pulse will only rarely coincide in position with another.

That’s enough solid physics for now! On with the story.

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19. Will I ever learn diplomacy?

Interactions with the physics community: the Innsbruck/Vienna set under

Anton Zeilinger, Jack Sarfatti, Myron Evans, David Schneider, David

Kielpinski, wikipedia

“When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of

death is ever likely to remove it.” Mark Twain

Most of my interactions with mainstream physicists have been by email and in newsgroups etc., and

some of these I have found really exciting, but back in 1996 I came near to personal confrontation

with someone I regard as the leader – Anton Zeilinger – the guru, then at Innsbruck and currently

in Vienna, under whom so many of the people involved in the entanglement matter studied at one

time or another. He has been one of the people to whom I had, on Pascazio’s advice, in 1995 sent

a copy of my Explosion paper, so presumably his email was a consequence. I was thrilled (and

overawed!) to receive an invitation to his laboratory in Innsbruck to observe an experiment that was

being planned. A copy of the proposal was enclosed. It took only a few exchanges, though, before

he realized that I was the last person he should invite! I pointed out that the test he proposed using

– the CHSH test – would be bound to be biased, due to the detection loophole. The correspondence

quietly fizzled out, keeping very civil on both sides but with careful avoidance, on his side, of the

facts. So much for that challenge (remember my travel phobia).

We have from time to time exchanged emails since – in particular, immediately after the

experiment (that by Gregor Weihs et al.

104) had actually been conducted. I pointed out various

indications of sources of bias, mainly the detection loophole but also, when it came to the diagrams,

the evidence for failure of “rotational invariance” (see Appendix #). In relation to the detection

loophole, what is needed is some kind of independent assessment of how the detectors are

behaving. My hypothesis is that they score effectively zero for all inputs up to some threshold

intensity, after which they start scoring “photons”. Surely a simple supplementary experiment

could be done to explore the actual response as input intensity was varied? I wrote to both Weihs (a

student, working at the time for his PhD) and Zeilinger suggesting this, and Weihs did at one point

agree. I heard nothing more, though.

I also issued Zeilinger with a challenge! I suggested an experiment involving two beamsplitters in

which he would not be able to say in a consistent manner how many “photons” he was dealing with.

He would, for low intensities, find his photons simply disappearing. If he had started with N, after

one beamplitter he would expect to detect ηN/2 at each of two (perfect) beamsplitters, where η is

the “quantum efficiency” of his detectors . After another beamsplitter he would would expect to

detect η2

N/4 if he used identical detectors. I suggested that he would be unable to get a score as

high as this. This is because each of the N/2 “photons” that passed through the first beamsplitter

would in reality have reduced intensity compared to the input. He was not dealing with photons at

all but with short wave trains.

Needless to say, I have never heard any more about this either. The original challenge has stayed

on my web site now for some years, but as far as I know nobody has tried the experiment. Of

course, in practice there would be details to be decided (polarizing or non-polarising beamsplitters,

pulsed or not pulsed laser source etc.) but just about any variation would be of interest in its own

right.

104 Weihs, Gregor et al., “Violation of Bell’s inequality under strict Einstein locality conditions”, Physical Review

Letters 81, 5039 (1998) and http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9810080

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It’s a sad situation. Students who want to get anywhere in this area of physics go to Zeilinger’s

laboratory for training and find themselves trapped. If they want to continue they have to toe the

line. The only other alternative is to get out into industry, and even here, if one is, say,

manufacturing photodetectors, one has to use the photon jargon. Another student who started in the

same boat as Weihs actually wrote, towards the end of his PhD training, that when he finished he

hoped to do more “honest” physics. I know he did escape from Zeilinger, but don’t know what

career he has landed up in.

Anyway, that’s the nearest I’ve got to meeting “real” physicists. There was another occasion,

causing almost equal butterflies, when I was invited by Jack Sarfatti to come to Arizona. (Sarfatti

may think of himself as a physicist, and quite and important one at that, but as far as I’m concerned

he is just a promulgator of fantasies. I wonder if he counts as “mainstream”?) He at first had taken

some interest in my Chaotic Ball model and thought I could give a seminar to his third-year

students. I’m afraid I put paid to that by saying that if I came at all it would have to be to speak to

students who were not yet committed to the course! I wanted them to know what they were in for

in time for them to back out. Our emails since (and there have been a few) have not been so very

amicable.

Another, certainly non-mainstream, physicist I have most certainly interacted with, though never

having met in person, is Myron Evans. He is the person directly responsible for the termination of

my cosy arrangement with the University of Wales Aberystwyth at the end of the year 2003. How

this came about it quite a little story.

I had been introduced to him a few years earlier by Trevor Marshall, who had thought it interesting

that Myron happened to have been at Aberystwyth. I doubt if Trevor thought I would actually

appreciate corresponding with him, as most of the messages that he broadcast to all and sundry

were begging ones. It seems that many years ago he had been in the chemistry department at

Aberystwyth, but had lost his job when the department closed down. He had gone to the States and

somehow got involved in physics, but with no regular income. He developed his own theory (B(3)

theory), the result of doing a mathematical operation on the E and B fields of Maxwell. I had

already, when he first told me of it, got my own ideas about these fields, and knew that what he had

done was just mathematical fantasy. When I told him so (do I ever just keep things to myself?) he

was not well pleased. I managed to get myself off his list and thought no more about it.

Then at the Storrs NPA conference of 2000, his name cropped up again. More than that, a whole

lecture was devoted to his work, and the fact that he seemed to have persuaded Apeiron (the journal

run by Roy Keys) to publish a whole issue on his papers on partly false pretences. Many of the

supposed co-authors of the papers claimed later not to have been consulted. To cut a long story

short, when I came to write about the conference on my web site I made a fatal mistake. Instead of

saying that Rodrigues had talked about his criticisms of Myron’s mathematics, I said something to

the effect that he had talked about what was wrong with it.

When, a couple of years later, Myron picked this up – probably from Google – he started grumbling

to all and sundry. At first it was just to members of his group, then he extended the range and one

of my internet correspondents happened to find out what he was saying. He was threatening to sue

me! I took no notice – in any event I don’t see what I could have done, since an apology at that

stage would not have removed the damage – but then I found that he really was going ahead. After

grumbling to the Welsh Assembly, he was now threatening to sue not me but the university. He’d

written to the Head of Physics, then Neville Greaves, and also to the Administration people.

Greaves informed me, and I immediately withdrew the offending page, but to no avail. Greaves did

no feel he could make a case for supporting me. As far as Admin were concerned, I was an

unnecessary risk.

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In the end, I was given just a few days notice before my web site was closed down and I could not

even persuade either the then Head of Computer Science or Greaves to support me sufficiently to

get continuity for my web site. It seemed impossible to provide a permanent link from my

Aberystwyth site to the new one that I’d quickly set up in virgin.net. This has proved a severe blow

to the publicity for my work, and one from which I’m only now, through my entries in “wikipedia”

(see later), perhaps recovering. I lost not only the web site but, equally important, my rights to the

library. Perhaps this is not quite such a blow as it would have been a few years ago, since a lot is

available in the quantum physics archive (arXiv.org) and anyone can read these, but there are some

important paper, especially historical ones, that I can now access only with great difficulty.

Incidentally, I did manage to salvage on thing from the wreck: my rights to contribute papers to the

archive as well as read them. I’ve used this right now a couple of times, and intend to use it more.

I have had no further contact with Myron. I don’t know if he realises the harm he did.

More recently, my “enemies” have not managed to do me quite as much harm, and not for want of

trying. At least in the area of the Bell test experiments, which is the only area in which I have tried

to influence the mainstream community, people do recognise that I have made a good case. They

no longer dismiss my postings to the sci.physics.research newsgroup, for instance, out of hand. The

moderators used to say they were “too controversial”. They are still controversial, but they realise

now, I think, that they are based on fact. As I may have said earlier, those individual experimenters

who have replied to my emails (and this has been a good percentage) have almost always been

courteous, quite often expressing interest, at least at first. To a man, though, they back out when

the going gets tough. They refrain from giving me the extra data I need, or from doing the

subsidiary experiments I suggest. Perhaps if I had a university post it would be different.

There have been a few exceptions, though. For the past few year I have had a battle royal with a

certain David Schneider (known as Dr Chinese), first in Physics Forums – a forum in which, it

seems, he has some power. When my postings began to threaten his own paper on the Bell’s

inequality – a paper talking about negative probabilities, which are, of course, absurd – he (or at any

rate I think it must have been he) banned me from the group. Then (as I had, in a way, hoped) he

started attacking my newly-contributed entries on the Bell tests in wikipedia105. He managed to get

my most important page effectively eliminated, at least for a while. I’ve had to rally troops among

my correspondents to get the material on the Bell test loopholes back. The matter is still (December

2005) open, but it does look as if he may have lost this particular battle.

Then there is the experimenter, David Kielpinski, to whom I wrote some years ago, asking

questions about an experiment using trapped ions that gained a lot of publicity at that time106. I

wrote again to him after he had started contributing to “my” wikipedia pages. He apologized for

not having replied to my original message and tried to dismiss my questions as “tendentious”

(whatever that means!), though he went on to say that they were ones that had been discussed at the

time, so they can’t have been that unimportant. He is one of the few to have tried to put me in my

place a little, though very politely. Didn’t I realise that the paper had been reviewed by experts?

And so it goes on. You win some you lose some.

105 Wikipedia, The Free Encylopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/

106 M Rowe et al, “Experimental violation of a Bell’s inequality with efficient detection”, Nature 409, 791 (2001);

Kielpinski, David et al, “Recent Results in Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing”, http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0102086

Caroline H Thompson

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20. Teleportation? Quantum computing?

“ Truth is our most valuable commodity. Let us economise it.” Mark Twain

The establishment has said itself that quantum theory is crazy. What they

don’t admit, though, is that the crazy parts, having never been seen, might be

wrong. If the original aims of quantum teleportation and computing are to be

achieved, those parts will really have to work!

The quantum myth becomes ever more entrenched, ever more weird. We have become used to

being told that our modern technology would not exist were it not for quantum theory. The

possibility that everything could have just been discovered by trial and error and people following

their intuition is not considered – let alone the possibility that we could have made even faster and

more reliable progress had we had a more realistic foundation to work on. Now, though, we are

told (and most people have no reason to disbelieve it) that magical quantum computers are in the

offing, some day to perform computations at many times the pace of an ordinary one, that with the

help of entangled photons we begin to explore Star-Trek-like teleportation, with no way of

understanding how it is supposed to work – it just pops out of the mathematics!

What is the truth of the matter, though? Teleportation is supposed to work between two

independent places, yet we find in the actual experiments that the two places are linked to a single

master laser. Without the shared information from that laser (and an associated nonlinear crystal,

producing interesting phase and polarization-correlated signals – see Ch. ##) would we still see the

effect?

[Diagram, from Furusawa98]

Perhaps this it not the most relevant “application of entanglement” these days. One hears more

about quantum encryption or, more specifically, quantum key distribution (QKD). Now this is an

area that actually works, in that one or two banks have (we’re told) actually started using it and

have not complained. The idea is to use correlated photons to set up an encryption code that can be

used by a sender and a receiver but which it is impossible for an eavesdropper to acquire and use. I

say it “works”, but, as I understand it, even those concerned realise that what they’ve really got is a

system that it very hard to break but not actually impossible. The reason (not unsurprisingly) is that

practical people realise that they can never in practice be sure they have got single photons. This

means that our eavesdropper could, in theory, detect spare photons that carried our special

information and use them to break the code. And they also realise that it does not really require

entangled photons. Correlated ones are good enough, so long as their polarization properties are

suitable. T

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21. Postscript

And so it goes on. Individual people listen, but as a group the establishment

chooses to continue to support quantum theory. The establishment journals

will not publish my work. The experimenters will not do the investigations I

have suggested. Hence this book! Can you, dear reader, and the general

public help to influence the powers that be?

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and

making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die

and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Max Planck

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really

make them think they’ll hate you.” Don Marquis

“What I don't understand I despise, what I despise I reject.” THE

REFEREE'S CREED

:

“The better you manipulate the english language the better the lies you could

tell, the same happens with math.”

12:03:02: Alt.sci.physics.new-theories: Laurent duchesnee@comcast.net in

“Photons: let’s try again”

“It was discovered that Engineering Progress is possible only if the Force applied is greater

than the Friction of Public Opposition and the Inertia of Business as Usual.”

( Martin Marietta: "Preparing for the Socio-engineering Age", ASEE PRISM '94,

quoted at http://home.iae.nl/users/benschop/inertia.htm )

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted,

all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we

now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

William Shakespeare [From http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/a132378.html