View source for Abolishing the Wave-Particle Duality Nonsense

{{Infobox paper
| title = Abolishing the Wave-Particle Duality Nonsense
| url = [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5711.pdf Link to paper]
| author = [[Xavier Borg]]
| keywords = [[photon]], [[wave-particle]], [[particle-wave]], [[duality]], [[light quanta]], [[propagation]]
| published = 2010
| journal = [[Electric Spacecraft Journal]]
| volume = 47
| num_pages = 13
| pages = 4-13
}}

'''Read the full paper''' [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5711.pdf here]

==Abstract==

This paper describes how waves account for their particulate nature, without the requirement for any particles to be involved. Using geometry and known facts about electromagnetic radiation it explores the truth behind the ghost particle otherwise known as the photon and hence the true nature of light. Through lots of illustrations, it explains quantum topics like duality, light quanta and quantization, all in terms of electromagnetic fields, radiation patterns and antennas, without any need for weird concepts like duality and quantization of the propagating light.  The debate about the true nature of light dates back to the 1600s. Christiaan Huygens proposed light was waves, whilst Isaac Newton came up with his own corpuscular (particle) theory. Since then, preference has flipped to and fro between these two opposing views. Currently the scientific community cannot properly resolve this debate, and it holds that ll waves also have a particle nature, and vice versa.

Also published in ''The General Science Journal''.

==Overview==

Xavier Borg of Blaze Labs published this paper on 9 September 2010. Its thesis is stated without hedging: "'Photons' simply do not exist." Everything the [[Photon|photon]] was invented to explain — energy and momentum delivered in localised packets, transfer at ''c'', no rest mass, and the failure of intensity to fall off as it should for a spreading wave — can, Borg argues, be reproduced by an ordinary classical electromagnetic wave that has simply been ''beam-shaped''. His term for the result is a ''quasi-planewave''.

The lever is a point of antenna engineering: the inverse square law is "simply a geometric law, and is not an inherent property of waves". It follows from the 4π''R''<sup>2</sup> area of a sphere and therefore holds only for a point source radiating spherically. A planewave keeps its cross-section — "a square cross sectional area size 2x2cm will still have the same shape and size after travelling 1km" — so its intensity is distance-invariant. Borg's move is to treat every atom as a high-gain aperture antenna. If atoms beam, then what is emitted and received is a packet of energy that neither spreads nor needs to "collapse", and the whole apparatus of duality and of quantised propagating light becomes unnecessary. He offers, in support, a bench-top test of the idea and a reinterpretation of quantised energy levels as antenna resonances.

==The argument==

===The virtual point source===

Borg's central construction is the ''virtual'' point source. A directional emitter cannot be modelled as a point at the centre of its physical aperture; instead its equivalent point source sits a distance ''f'' ''behind'' the aperture, so that the wavefronts leave the aperture already flattened. Applying the inverse square law then requires ''R'' = ''f'' + ''d'' rather than ''R'' = ''d'':

: ''I'' = ''P'' / [4π(''f'' + ''d'')<sup>2</sup>],  ''f'' = √(''A''<sub>eff</sub>/π) / tan(θ/2)

with ''P'' = ''G'' × ''P''<sub>iso</sub> the effective radiated power and θ the beam divergence. For ''f'' ≫ ''d'' the distance dependence disappears entirely and ''I'' → ''GP''<sub>iso</sub>/(4π''f''<sup>2</sup>), the planewave result. His numerical illustration is the point of the section: for an ordinary point source, doubling the range from 1 m to 2 m leaves 25% of the intensity; for a source whose virtual focus lies 1 km back, the ratio is (1001/1002)<sup>2</sup> = 99.8%. "You throw a packet of energy, and receive the same packet of energy!" — and, he stresses, with no box, no wavefunction collapse, and no violation of any law, since the thing propagating is only an electromagnetic wave travelling at ''c''.

He then supplies the standard aperture-antenna relations — ''A''<sub>eff</sub> = μ''A''<sub>ph</sub> with efficiency μ ≈ 70%, ''G'' = 4π''A''<sub>eff</sub>/λ<sup>2</sup>, θ = √(4π/''G''), θ = λ/√''A''<sub>eff</sub> — and draws the consequence he needs: gain rises as the square of frequency, so higher-frequency radiation from the same aperture is more sharply beamed. That, he says, is why radio waves never display particle behaviour while visible light and X-rays do; the "extent to which the wave shows its 'particle like' behaviour depends only on the gain of the source and the detector."

===The atom as an antenna===

To make atoms qualify as high-gain radiators Borg needs their effective aperture to exceed their geometric cross-section, and he quotes two mainstream papers to that effect: C. F. Bohren's "How can a particle absorb more than the light incident on it?" (''Am. J. Phys.'' 51, 1983) and Paul and Fischer's "Light absorption by a dipole" (''Sov. Phys. Usp.'' 26, 1983), the latter noting that an atom can "'suck up' electromagnetic energy from a spatial region that is by far larger than its own volume." On this reading, absorption curves "are nothing but the frequency response curves of our atoms"; an absorption peak is an impedance match, and the peaks of the mass-attenuation curve for lead should coincide with peaks of effective aperture.

===A proposed experiment===

Borg's most useful contribution is a falsifiable prediction. If X-ray emission is a narrow beam rather than a point-like quantum, the beam must have finite width, and at sufficient range it should strike two detectors ''at once'' — something the orthodox account forbids. Taking a tungsten source atom (radius 139 pm), a silicon detector atom (radius 111 pm), λ ≈ 60 pm and 100% aperture efficiency, he computes a combined gain of 28,628 (44.6 dB), a beamwidth θ = 1.2°, and a virtual source distance ''f'' = 13,273 pm. At 50 cm range this puts the 3 dB point 5.2 mm off axis, so two detectors 5.2 mm apart should register the same event simultaneously half the time, with the first null near 1 cm. Such a result, he writes, "will definitely experimentally abolish the wave particle duality."

He also heads off the obvious objection that radioactive sources visibly obey the inverse square law: a sphere covered in many independent beamed radiators reproduces 1/''R''<sup>2</sup> because it is the ''number of beams per unit area'' that thins with distance, not the intensity of any one beam. Nine beams through an area at ''D'' become one beam through the same area at 3''D''.

===Quantisation as antenna resonance===

The closing sections put Planck against Einstein. Borg cites [[Max Planck]]'s 1909 objection — how could a point-like quantum interfere with itself over thousands of wavelengths? — and Planck's insistence that quantisation belongs to "the area of interaction between matter and radiation energy", not to the propagating field. Einstein's 1905 heuristic paper, Borg argues, illegitimately extended quantisation to the field itself, knowing that this required Maxwell's and Lorentz's electrodynamics to be wrong. He lists the difficulties Einstein faced (light quanta should have mass ''E''/''c''<sup>2</sup>; quanta cannot interfere, cannot be split, cannot account for partial reflection) and says they were "patched up by DECLARING the photon to have zero mass". His analogy is an analogue-to-digital converter sending 0 V or 5 V over a wire: the data are quantised, the wire is not. Energy levels then become the resonance channels of a fractal-antenna atom, with the Lyman, Paschen and Brackett series arising from intermediate structural scales.

==Assessment==

Two things in this paper are genuinely good. The first is the observation that the inverse square law is geometry rather than physics, and that a great deal of loose reasoning about "spreading" waves ignores what a directional aperture does — the virtual-focus treatment of a high-gain radiator is correct antenna engineering, and the 99.8% example makes the point vividly. The second is that Borg does what most papers of this kind do not: he states a specific, cheap, numerically-quantified experiment that would decide against him, complete with detector spacings in millimetres. That is a real intellectual virtue and it deserves saying.

The difficulties are nevertheless severe, and the sharpest of them is internal. Borg forms his beamwidth from the ''product'' of source and detector gains, ''G'' = ''G''<sub>source</sub> × ''G''<sub>target</sub> = 28,628, and then feeds that product into θ = √(4π/''G''), a formula for the beamwidth of a single antenna. A source's beam angle cannot depend on what is placed in front of it. Using his own source gain alone, 4π(π × 139<sup>2</sup>)/60<sup>2</sup> ≈ 212, the same formula returns θ ≈ 14°, not 1.2° — an order of magnitude wider, which moves his predicted detector spacing from 5.2 mm to about 6 cm and changes the "first null" geometry entirely. The paper's one testable number therefore does not follow from the paper's own equations. There is a second inconsistency alongside it: the Bohren and Paul-Fischer citations are introduced precisely to establish that an atom's effective aperture greatly exceeds its geometric cross-section, yet the calculation then sets ''A''<sub>eff</sub> equal to the geometric cross-section π''r''<sup>2</sup> of the atomic radius.

The wider problem is that the quasi-planewave picture is a classical field theory, and classical fields make predictions about photon statistics that have been measured and found false. The experiment Borg proposes is, in essence, the beamsplitter anticoincidence test performed by Grangier, Roger and Aspect in 1986 on single-photon emission from a calcium cascade: a classical wave of any beam shape must give a coincidence rate at or above the classical limit, and the measured rate fell far below it. Photon antibunching in resonance fluorescence is the same result seen in the time domain. A beam that is narrow but continuous cannot produce sub-Poissonian counting statistics, however sharply it is focused. Borg does not address either measurement.

Nor does the antenna reading of absorption survive contact with the lead attenuation curve he reproduces. Its low-energy structure does consist of resonance-like features — the K, L and M photoelectric edges — but these are sharp ''steps'' at ionisation energies, not the symmetric peaks of a tuned aperture, and the rise above about 1.022 MeV is pair production, a threshold set by 2''m''<sub>e</sub>''c''<sup>2</sup> with no antenna analogue at all. The photoelectric effect's own signature — an emission threshold fixed by frequency and wholly independent of intensity — is likewise left untouched, and it is exactly the observation a continuous field has most trouble with. Finally the multiple-beam rescue of the inverse square law (Fig. 9) implies that a stellar or radioactive flux measured at large distance should be granular, a mosaic of hit and missed beams, rather than the smooth 1/''R''<sup>2</sup> falloff observed; the paper counts beams to recover the average but does not ask about the variance.

What remains, then, is a well-motivated and unusually concrete challenge that fails on its own arithmetic before it reaches the experiments that already bear on it. Read as antenna engineering the paper is instructive; read as a replacement for the quantum theory of light it does not have the numbers behind it.

==See also==

* [[Xavier Borg]]
* [[Photon]]
* [[Light]]
* [[Max Planck]]
* [[Albert Einstein]]
* [[Isaac Newton]]
* [[Quantum mechanics]]
* [[Speed of Light]]
* [[Maxwell's Equations]]
* [[Hendrik Lorentz]]
* [[Atom]]

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