The Quantum Bubble
By: Brett Holverstott
Tags: Science, Quantum Physics

The Model Building Continues

It cannot be underestimated how strong a grip quantum mechanics held on the physics community. Only a trickle of lone voices, spread over the next several decades, still spoke of the unsolved problem of radiation from a classical electron. So unpopular was this topic that authors, in their technical papers, often apologized in print for bringing it up.

So long as the electron was a point, it had to radiate under any form of acceleration. But the electron couldn’t radiate in the atom. So, it couldn’t be a point. Physicists turned to the next best thing: spherical shells. Shells have an intuitive appeal to physicists. Fritz Zwicky once insulted a colleague thus: “he is a spherical bastard, a bastard any way you look at him.”

First explored by Abraham, Lorentz, and Poincare, spherical shell models had a growing repertoire of their own problems. How did they stay together instead of blowing apart from self-repulsion? How could they remain stable?

In 1933, less then a decade after Heisenberg and Schrodinger’s work, G.A. Schott published a paper which described a theoretical scenario in which it is possible for an extended charged distribution — again a spherical shell — to accelerate in a circular orbit without radiating energy. If the sphere is spinning and orbiting at the same time, and if the periods of these were set just right, the sphere would never radiate.

He had a proof of concept that classical laws might be able to solve the problems faced by atomic theorists.

Schott continued studying classical models, as did Dirac, who published in 1938. Despite Schott’s progress, Dirac continued to insist that quantum mechanics was the only option on the table; propping a myth that has been sustained to this day.

The real breakthrough occurred in 1963, when George Goedecke published a more general description of radiationless motions. He studied various spherical shells and solid spheres, spinning or fixed. He was excited by his preliminary results to speculate on:

a ‘theory of nature’ in which all stable particles (or aggregates) are merely nonradiating charge-current distributions whose mechanical properties are electromagnetic in origin.

Although Goedecke’s research on radiation diffused into the general consciousness of the field, there was very little interest in moving it forward.

In 1986, a professor at MIT, Herman Haus — apparently without knowledge of Goedecke’s work — published his own general condition for acceleration without radiation, one that was more physically intuitive. He showed that a current distribution would only radiate if it contained Fourier components that were lightlike, synchronous with light speed.

But so had quantum mechanics diverged from classical mechanics that Haus didn’t know that he was contributing to quantum theory. He imagined charge distributions as dense collections of points instead of a continuous surface membrane that could describe a fundamental particle.

Haus gave a talk about his paper to his graduate class. One of his students voiced an interest, and Haus handed him a copy. The student was Randell Mills.

Mills was something of a polymath who was earning an MD at Harvard, but was more interested in inventing new medical technology. Having completed his medical coursework in only three years, he was using his fourth year for electives at MIT. In the first years out of med school, Mills churned through the math for a new a kind of MRI, invented and tested a complex chemical chain reaction for a new drug delivery compound, and invented and tested a new kind of cancer therapy based on the Mossbauer Effect. The latter earned him a publication in Nature.

When these kinds of intellectuals happen, best idea is for the rest of us to just get out of the way.

When Mills read Haus’s paper as a student, he imagined that it could provide the foundation for a new theory of nature, in which electrons were classical membranes of charge constrained by the requirement of no radiation. Over the next few years, Mills developed the foundation for a new theory in which the electron was a spherical membrane of moving charge, like a soap bubble, centered on the proton.

While classical electron theorists had always assumed some kind of sphere (oscillating or orbiting, rigid or deformable) would be the answer, they had never considered centering an electron shell on the proton before. Although the math was more complicated, the basic physics was very similar to Bohr’s model of the atom.

Mills’s model matched the well known energy levels of hydrogen. But it did more: it was the first to offer a physical explanation for why the ground state orbit was stable to radiation but the excited states were not, using the Goedecke-Haus condition.

In the decade that followed, Mills took his model light years ahead of quantum mechanics in terms of predictive power. He calculated the state lifetimes and line intensities of the hydrogen excited states, thousands of numbers. He calculated the spectrum of helium, thousands of numbers. He calculated the electron energy levels of the first twenty-electron atoms in the periodic table, walking through the atoms one by one, hundreds of numbers that matched to within the error bars of NIST experimental data.

In quantum mechanics, any interaction between two electrons is basically an unsolved problem, and a computational nightmare. But Mills’s electron shells reduced the problem to a much simpler force equation. And by incorporating relativistic corrections for the fast-moving inner electron shells, it made the theory’s predictions even more accurate.

Mills spent another several years rebuilding all of quantum chemistry with his own model, calculating bond energies, lengths, and geometry.

Despite this demonstration of predictive value, Mills’s theory has been subject to the embargo of alternative theories by mainstream physicists. It is not a conspiracy, just psychology. It is the same with every other moment of revolutionary change; the old guard resists the change, while the young and curious embrace it.

There is much to do. We have learned to think through the quantum sieve about so many experiments in the last eighty years that unraveling the way quantum models wave-particle duality, non-locality, tunneling, and quantum teleportation will not be easy. We are constantly told that our intuitions about nature must be wrong, instead of the other viable alternative — our model for understanding the phenomena is bad. Really bad.

While the ability to calculate known experimental data is one thing, what the scientific community really needs to engage a new paradigm of thought is at least one model experiment that demonstrates the abject failure of the old paradigm.

For good measure, let’s discuss two.