1. “If we can’t see or measure it, it doesn’t exist.”

2. “You could not possibly understand so just rack it up to Quantum Weirdness”.

The first is nothing but laziness, and possibly arrogance.  It is time to stop hiding behind this excuse and find a way, directly or indirectly.  It took a few decades to set the precedent but Dark matter and energy are now “accepted” because of indirect evidence, so clinging to the first maxim is already outdated.  For the same reason, this excuse cannot be used to deny the existence of new matter introduced on other pages of this site.

The second maxim is a mere cop-out reminiscent of that used by priesthoods of not too long ago. 

This particular page begins with the two-slit experiment to show once again how incorrect assumptions and lack of insight invariably led to the “weirdness” reputation.

Reading "The (Long and Winding) Road to Reality" (Discover/June 05), I can fully sympathise with Sir Roger Penrose and agree that quantum theory is maddeningly incomplete.  A particle being in more than one place at once is simply ridiculous.  I could remain silent no longer (a separate explanation for two slits and particles of matter was already on another page).

There have been many papers describing the famous two slit experiments first performed by Thomas Young in 1800.  In recent years everyone was dumbfounded by what happened when they reduced emission.

Incredibly, the interference pattern still built up on the target film, even though only one photon was fired at a time.  How could that be?  Suitably placed detectors proved that the photon always went through one slit or the other.

Without the detectors, the photon was not absorbed and therefore free to interfere, but with what?  The fatal assumption was that the photon could only interfere with itself!  Supposedly, the photon split, went through both slits and interfered with itself on the other side.

Like many explanations, that sounds good if you say it fast, but not if you stop and think about it.  Why would a photon do that even if it could?  Photons can travel for millions of light years undivided and still eject an electron from metal.  Are we to believe that this one now falls to pieces at the mere prospect of meeting two slits?

Some scientists even went so far as to suggest that the photon had some sort of communication capability and intelligence.  The photon supposedly “knew” in advance if a detector was present and “decided” to go through one slit or both. 

Human consciousness of the experiment conditions was also suggested to somehow affect the photon.  So much for voodoo explanations or the currently fashionable, “blame it on quantum weirdness”.

The single photon always goes through only one slit. Multiple instances of ‘something else’ however, were emitted along with the single photon.  It is these ‘others’ that go through both slits. 

Since the days of Planck and Einstein we have known that energy must be raised beyond a minimum threshold before photons can be radiated or absorbed.   Because of the detector threshold, we are blinded to the fact that a sub-threshold “something else” is also present.

I posit that the “something else” is a low energy “photon wannabe”, or for lack of a better term, a "paraphoton".

Because of their lower energy, paraphotons are more easily diverted by edges of the slits and spread out after the transit.  The single photon always goes straight through one slit; it is only the fanned out paraphotons from both slits that now interfere with each other, anywhere on the screen.

When two paraphotons constructively interfere their combined energy can equal that of a ‘normal’ photon and these spots build up the bright lines on the film.  (Fig.1)

If path lengths result in out-of-phase meetings, the paraphoton cancellations account for the dark lines.

It is worth noting that the bright line built up in the centre of Fig. 1 is also contributed to by single real photons going straight through one slit or the other.

The slits are extremely close and their lines are indistinguishable on the screen among the paraphoton hits.

Researchers were led to an incorrect conclusion because their detectors were oblivious to paraphotons. 

Generating a photon is a violent event such as when an electron jumps an energy level in an atom.  In the process many of its attached links are severed with a “snap” that produces the transverse pulse in a bundle of links.  The point is; it is seldom just one bundle with the right energy to qualify as a photon that is produced.

Plenty of other snapped links form smaller bundles with a pulse on them, and become paraphotons.

Another interesting tidbit is the fact that paraphotons are sometimes emitted between firings of the single real photons.  If two of them arrive at the film in-phase they can produce a ‘false’ bright spot on film.  Researchers have also noted these but ignored them as “noise” since to their knowledge, it was not one of their photons emitted at that time.  Again they blamed it on a random emission from the “quantum soup”.

Ok, let us go back to 1800 and Young’s original setup.  The author has never seen one thing mentioned, let alone explained.

At one stage, Young closed one slit and observed only a narrow line on the screen, directly behind the slit.  He concluded that the photons were going straight through like little bullets, and he probably coined the term “ballistic pattern”.

Now for the unexplained phenomenon:

Why did the photons apparently spread out and interfere over a broad area when the second slit was opened?  How did the photons “know” to suddenly spread out from the previously tight beam? Conventional wisdom assumes the spreading took place because Young changed to detecting the photons

as waves!   The display screen was not touched!  The only change was the opening of a second slit.  There is no way the simple act of opening a second slit can make photons transiting either slit suddenly spread out.          Please think about that for a moment. 

One must conclude that the photons never did spread out!  Be it one slit or two, real photon behaviour did not change and they always shot straight ahead in a narrow beam.  Paraphoton spreading however was always there and did not suddenly appear when the second slit was opened.

Along with photons going straight through the first slit were our undetected paraphotons.  They were already fanned out and when the second slit was opened, its paraphotons interfered with the former.

Almost from the beginning, Einstein had recognized that the possibility of “instant action at a distance” was built into the math of quantum theory and railed against it. 

Erwin Schrödinger coined the term “entanglement” and used it for the first time in 1935, in a discussion of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper.  In 1964, John Bell’s paper “On the EPR Paradox” marked the beginning of evidence that spatially separated particles really do exhibit instantaneous correlation.

Entanglement is now one of the hottest areas of research and experimentation into possibilities for quantum computers, encryption, and even teleportation (of photons).  Some “weird”, unknown mechanism has been hyped for its apparently exceeding the speed of light.  

Unfortunately, that is still the impression being left in the media but it is again, a wrong assumption.  By understanding the nature of bundled links we will see that paradox dissolve.  There is no spooky or weird event here because nothing was moved or propagated faster than light.

 A simple form of encryption used in the past was the “codebook” with a copy sent to a distant location.  Real time radio communications were then compared to the code book at the receiving location and the message decrypted. 

This was not even communication at light speed because the code book had to be delivered separately and usually by much slower means.

 Measuring the polarization of one photon has been shown to instantly determine the polarization of its distant twin.  These photons were produced in pairs and like the codebook; one had to be first delivered to the distant location at a maximum speed of c.  Thus, the process as a whole is already sub light speed.

The novel thing is that the polarization switching is instant over any distance.  Note however, that in switching polarization nothing was actually moved or propagated; the distant twin photon was already there!  (Or at least still had to get there at c).

Energy content of the distant photon also remains unchanged in switching polarization.  There was thus no energy transfer over distance involved. The experimenters don’t realize it yet but these effects are due to the nature of energy links in bundles.

A transverse pulse (photon) cannot propagate along a continuous bundle faster than c but a twist is felt instantly at the distant end. 

The entangled photons behave just as if there is a continuous axel between them.  An axel or any part of it does not of course move from one wheel to another faster than light.  The axel is just there, and if it were truly continuous (like a bundle of links), turning one end would instantly turn the other.

Anton Zeilinger recently demonstrated the effect over 144 km. between La Palma and Tenerife of the Canary Islands.  Energy links carrying the photon pulse usually survived the long transmission through air because they are always in a robust bundle.  Single photons were identifiable in the confines of a telescopically focused and received laser beam.

The thought may occur “what if we could hold onto the two photons and digitally flip polarization back and forth?”  Would that not be FTL communication? 

Absolutely not!  As soon as the polarization is detected, the photon is absorbed and you would have to start all over with the sub light speed process for the next bit of information.