Here are recent lecture videos and their slides for A Serious Challenge to Quantum Mechanics. At top are most recent. Early versions emphasized experiment, history, theory.
Click the book for the PDF. This PDF has nice links to use from your computer, does not print, and does not include the sensational chapter of Eric's Life and Works. Amazon has the paperback. Buy three to save on shipping. A bargain.
Overcoming the quantum mechanics measurement problem by experiment and theory
New video 2023. The Photoelectric and Compton Effects Without Photons
One minute video.
Quantum mechanics fails in our experiments
There is a type of experiment, famous for upholding quantum mechanics that argues for a particle property of light. In that same type of experiment, for the first time ever, we used gamma-rays. Quantum mechanics fails! For the wave-particle property of matter, we report the same sensational result using alpha-rays. We are not just showing wave or particle properties. We show how the particle property fails. Additionally, a new theory and a new interpretation of key historical experiments lead to replacing quantization with a threshold model. Quantum mechanics will confuse you with entanglement, non-locality, wave-function collapse, photons, superposition, virtual particles and quantum-particle weirdness. Those concepts are all the same. Here, we transcend those concepts.
Public lecture and demonstration. See this.
This sensational video shows every step of the experiment as if you were in the lab.
To clarify: This is a threshold model of charge. There are no photons. Light is classical.
Who are we?
It is Eric S Reiter, and help from my wife and friends. Studied physics at Sonoma State University 1977- 1980, and biology at San Francisco State U. While doing business as Computer Continuum 1980-1995 I produced laboratory and automation circuits and software for personal computers. Now I do Independent research and consulting. Published: Progress In Physics, SPIE What are Photons? conference 2015, Foundations of Mind conference 2016. My technical sculptures were well received at San Francisco's Exploratorium 1969-1974. Credit is given to my friend Ken Kitlas for many important consultations and donations toward the unquantum project. For any reasonable inquiry into me or this work, contact information is very easy to find and use. We do not answer anonymous calls. Thank you for your interest.
Let me explain what I see as my most important accomplishment: the idea I call nature's ratio principle. The realization was after months of study in year 2000, working simple equations like those for the photoelectric and Compton effects, equations of key experiments you will find in any introductory modern physics book.
I wrote to a SFSU physics teacher, Roger Bland, and asked: which experiments deliver Planck's constant? He nicely wrote back citing experiments I already knew of. However, that had me thinking.
It was during a walk in the park with my wife Miriam, the realization hit me, hit me hard, that once-in-a-lifetime kind of ah-ha moment you hear-tell about. Those key experiments do not deliver Planck's constant by itself. They deliver a ratio of two important constants. Thinking of the electron, the ratios are e/m, h/m, and e/h, where e = electron charge, m = electron mass, and h = Planck's constant. Wave and particle properties are mutually exclusive. We have wave and particle terms in our equations. So what gives? Those pesky little constants m, h, and e in our equations made us think of particles. The ratio principle resolves the issue.
Take the case of nuclear decay emitting an electron's worth of charge. At the instant of emission the charge-wave will have a quantized e and m. Consider thereafter a charge-wave spreads, diffracts, and interferes; no particle. Now visualize a small sample volume of that initial emission and realize that its e/m ratio is conserved. In that sample volume, let us imagine a hundredth of the original e and a hundredth of the original m. Now realize those hundreds will cancel to deliver the ratio e/m, the way our experiments read. Then picture that an absorber can soak up that charge wave until threshold e and threshold_m are reached. The hypothesis is to treat our constants to indicate thresholds. We apply similar arguments to the other two ratios e/h, h/m. Without this ratio principle, the result of our unquantum effect experiment would seem impossible.
Let us examine how we know e and m. JJ Thomson's electron deflection experiment was the first to deliver the ratio e/m. JJ also did an oil-drop experiment to reveal the charge constant e. Therefore JJ also gave us m. Back then, charge was assumed to be quantized in free space, as well as in larger masses. But take notice: we know e, independently of m only in experiments upon a relatively large mass, like the oil drop experiment. In a large mass, an ensemble effect can rally the charges toward our threshold_e such that the experiment will reveal only multiples of e. This argument also applies to Faraday constant and shot noise experiments.
Our experiments reveal quantization, but it is an illusion of a deeper truth, that being thresholds. Our theory makes quantzation a subset of thresholding. Looking back to the equations of our key experiments, we now take e, m, and h as maxima, whereby charge, mass, and action need not be quantized in free space. Indeed, Planck proposed that his action constant was a threshold in 1911. In most cases the concept of thresholding will work where quantization was assumed. We are not advocating to throw out quantum mechanics altogether.
By assigning the wave-function to abstract probability, quantum mechanics leads to incomprehensible macroscopic wave-function collapse, and all that weirdness you hear-tell about. The distinction between quantum mechanics and the threshold model is performed by the unquantum effect experiments. My theory and experiments can be seen as an inverse of that wave-collapse discontinuity. A microscopic accumulation-discontinuity happens instead of a macroscopic collapse-discontinuity.