Photonic Solutions to 
          Quantum Problems 
                by
           Vernon Brown





In 1991, Saleh and Teich published, 
_Fundamentals_of_Photonics_, and produced a perfect 
tool for solving the last remaining problems in the 
great quantum puzzle of how the universe is built.   
After studying this book, many scientists began to 
suppose that Albert Einstein may have been right 
after all. Light could be made of particle-like waves 
instead of wave-like particles.

There always comes a time in the course of 
successfully solving a very difficult problem when 
the answers seem to just fall out of the sky. All the 
pieces of the puzzle fit so snug and easy that the true 
nature of the whole is obvious and no other solution 
could possibly work. This is happening now in the 
case of fundamental quantum physics.

The answer to the problem of wave-particle 
duality came first. This problem began when 
scientists noticed that photons impacted upon 
photon detectors at small points, and so surely must 
be particles. Passing through two slits and impacting 
upon a flat screen these same photons produced 
interference patterns that could only come from 
waves. Scientists could not resolve this using either 
the idea that light was made of waves or that it was 
made of particles. Most scientists--we can call them 
mainstream scientists--finally concluded that light 
must be made of wave-like particles that existed in a 
strange world of statistical probability.

A smaller group of scientists that included 
Albert Einstein thought that this was not reasonable. 
Single particles could not possibly exist as the wave 
shapes they saw. This group thought that light must 
be made of waves as described by Maxwell's 
equations and hoped to prove it with a, "unified field 
theory." After all, waves were perfectly capable of 
existing in a local area and could reasonably contain 
peaks of amplitude that existed as points within the 
wave.

Einstein never quite completed this concept 
to his own satisfaction, however. His frustration was 
evident when he said, "As a matter of fact up to now 
we have never succeeded in representing corpuscles 
theoretically by fields free of singularities, and we 
can, a priori, say nothing about the behavior of such 
entities. One thing, however, is certain: if a field 
theory results in a representation of corpuscles free 
of singularities, then the behavior of these corpuscles 
with time is determined solely by the [partial] 
differential equations of the field." 

There was another problem with this idea 
that was even more damaging than Einstein's failure 
to produce a unified field theory. Scientists called it, 
"action at a distance," and philosophers had 
concluded that action at a distance was not possible. 
They said that one particle could not possibly cause 
a change in another particle without something 
going from the one to the other. The idea that there 
may exist a field of force in the vacuum of space was 
not allowed. A particle-like wave of electric and 
magnetic force fields could not then exist. Scientists 
who agreed with Einstein solved the wave-particle 
dilemma only to create an action-at-a-distance 
dilemma.

Not to be so quickly shot down, these 
scientists reasoned that electric and magnetic force 
fields may be caused by the exchange of some 
minute thing, maybe even a billion times smaller than 
a photon. Who knows what these might be? They 
might be strings, or super strings, or some such. 
Possibilities were infinite, but this idea gained them 
little following.

They reasoned finally that they didn't really 
need to know all the details about things smaller 
than photons to accomplish a unified theory any 
more than pyramid builders needed to know the 
atomic structure of the rocks they hauled. What ever 
caused electric and magnetic force fields, they knew 
they were there and if they accepted them as they 
saw them, photons existed as moving points of 
constant amplitude within these fields.

After Einstein's death, the unified field 
concept lost ground steadily to the statistical-wave-
like particle concept and it seemed that there would 
be a major breakthrough in quantum physics at any 
moment. Billions of dollars were allocated to herald 
in this breakthrough. Super-conducting super 
colliders were planned and students prepared to man 
the research teams that would be required to run 
them. But, just when it was at its peak, this wave-
like particle concept began to collapse.

From out of the blue answers came favoring 
Einstein's idea. In 1991 the book, Fundamentals of 
Photonics, showed how photons interacted in such a 
way that they could form stable loops. Dr. Robert 
Hofstadter of Stanford University had found that 
atomic nuclei existed as multiple-shell structures and 
was awarded the 1961 Nobel prize in physics for his 
discovery.  This new book inspired the square-of-
the-shells rule that added theoretical insight to 
Hofstadter's shells, and in 1994 the article, 
"Hofstadter's Shells Revisited," showed that these 
shells must be made of photons trapped in loops by 
their own resonance and charge. This provided 
means to verify the shell diameters that Hofstadter 
observed, and showed that the electric charges on 
the surface of the shells were exactly strong enough 
to be the source of the strong nuclear interactions. 

Charges originated at the surface of the 
shells. This avoided Einstein's problem with 
singularities and so removed the last obstacle to his 
Unified Field Theory. One need only plug in the 
numbers to complete it. Who will be first?

Scientists knew early in the twentieth century 
that relativity would be the natural result if the most 
basic components of mass moved in a local area at 
the constant speed of light.  When "Hofstadter's 
Shells Revisited," showed that this must be the case, 
relativity was no longer a great mystery. Nature 
could not possibly be otherwise given that mass was 
made of light.

This is no small thing. If mass is not made of 
light, we must invent something that will act upon 
mass and make it deform with motion and dilate in 
time just exactly as it would if it were made of light 
because we see that it does just that. Why invent 
such a fantasy? Why not simply accept reality as we 
see it? We then have a reasonable "photonic 
solution" for the phenomenon of relativity.

Richard Feynman saw the photon as a single 
point moving through space at the speed of light.  
Each photon had the potential to produce the same 
amount of Joule-seconds worth of energy-time  and 
since they were particles, they could never be 
partially absorbed. Electrons could absorb and emit 
only complete photons causing both to change 
direction of travel.

Electronics engineers have a problem with 
this idea, however. They know that when they force 
electrons to move back and forth in a wire, photons 
seem to leave the wire and move out through space. 
When these photons pass close to another wire some 
distance away, electrons in that wire move the same 
way the original electrons moved. Electrons in the 
second wire begin to move in exactly the time it 
takes light to travel from one wire to the other. 
There is no delay such as would be required if only a 
complete photon could start the motion.

Since photons exist in time--energy-time 
potential is what they are--they cannot be complete 
until enough time passes for them to form. There is 
no limit to the amount of time. It may be a 
microsecond, a second, or even an hour depending 
upon the photon's wave length. If that photon can 
not be partially absorbed, how come the electrons in 
the second wire begin to move before any single 
photon can be completely formed by the first wire?

When a photon passes very close to a slow-
moving electron, the electron changes direction, the 
photon changes direction, and the photon loses 
some of its energy. Arthur H. Compton studied this 
phenomenon and it became known as the, "Compton 
Effect."  If we believe what we see, the photon is 
partially absorbed by the electron.

Of course we could always make up some 
excuse to explain the photon's behavior while 
holding fast to the notion that it cannot be partially 
absorbed. We could say, for example, that the 
electron completely absorbs the photon then emits 
another photon that has less energy than the first.

But, then there is that problem with time. 
The electron starts to move before the photon can 
completely arrive. If the photon exists as energy-
time, it cannot possibly impart its total energy before 
its total time elapses. Also, there is no delay in the 
reflected photon, and such a delay would surely be 
there if the photon must be absorbed then emitted.

We could excuse this strange behavior by 
saying that photons of long wave length possess 
components of short wave length that can arrive in 
time to start the electron's new motion. But, then 
short wave-length photons have more energy than 
long wave-length photons and that greater energy 
does not show up, so these can't be real photons. 
Richard Feynman called them, "virtual photons."

If we keep making excuses for the electron's 
premature movement, we must assign some weird 
properties to photons like rotating arrows of 
probability, as Richard Feynman did. Even those 
don't quite work, so we must make up even more 
weird things like, "virtual photons," that are just 
almost real and act in advance of the real photons. 
Then, these don't quite work either so we must 
invent other kinds of virtual particles and assign 
them properties that cannot be observed.

This was the state of mainstream quantum 
physics before 1991. It just kept getting weirder and 
weirder.

The, "photonics solution," explains photon-
electron interaction by letting photons naturally 
exchange energy with other photons, including those 
that comprise electrons, just the way we see them do 
it. Since they are made of particle-like waves any 
photon may be partially absorbed leaving a photon 
of less energy.

Why then, if photons may be partially 
absorbed, does the photo-electric effect absorb and 
emit only complete photons? Why does all the 
spectral phenomena of atoms exist? Didn't scientists 
predict the phenomena based upon the concept that 
photons were particles and could only be completely 
absorbed and emitted?

The photonic solution for this is very simple. 
The structures of atoms bind their components in 
such a way that they absorb and emit only photons 
that resonate with the structure. Photons of the 
wrong frequency pass by with no effect, while 
photons of the correct frequency are completely 
absorbed when they pass close and resonate with the 
structure of the atom.

The dynamics of an atom produce a complex 
structure changing in time. Since the photon is a 
localized wave, it need not hit its absorbing particle 
dead center but must only pass close enough for its 
spread-out fields to resonate with some structure in 
it. Dynamic timing in the particle must be just right 
for absorption to occur. Particles at a distance from 
the photon's center may be timed just right when 
closer particles are not, so the distant particle 
absorbs the photon. This interaction causes the 
observed statistical-random effect in position and 
time when photons impact upon photon detectors. 
The statistical randomness is caused by the dynamics 
of the structure of the absorbing particles and not by 
the nature of the photon, as was previously assumed.

Resonance is a very powerful force, and 
photons should resonate readily with electrons of 
circumference equal to their wavelength. This 
circumference is 2.4 x 10-10 centimeters if the 
electron is made of a photon shell in accord with the, 
"photonics solution."  This just happens to be the 
Compton wavelength of electron resonance; why so 
is a mystery to the wave-like-particle folks, but it is 
a natural requirement for the particle-like-wave 
folks.

J. J. Thomson showed in 1881 that a moving 
object with electric charge must be more massive 
than such an object at rest,  and Henri Poincare 
wrote the famous equation E=mc2 in 1900,  five 
years before Albert Einstein published his special 
theory of relativity.   Einstein completed the idea 
by showing that mass and energy were really just 
two different forms of the same thing. 

This state of things is obvious, reasonable, 
and required in the photonics concept. If the 
particles in mass are made of photons, mass must 
necessarily release those photons and their energy 
must necessarily be felt when the mass comes 
unglued. If mass is made of wave-like particles this 
is a great mystery.


Given the photonic structure of mass, these 
reasonable answers to quantum problems not only 
are obvious, they are necessarily the way we observe 
them to be. These include relativity, wave-particle 
duality, mass-energy equivalence, the statistical 
nature of quantum physics, strong nuclear forces, 
cause of Planck's constant, gravity, cause of electric 
charge, and the constancy of electric charge.  
Could all this be mere coincidence? If Nick The 
Greek gave a fifty-fifty chance that the photonics 
cause for each one of these complex phenomena fit 
nature so perfectly by pure chance, his final odds 
would be 99.9 to one in favor of the photonics 
solution. 

Quantum mechanics still stands as the best 
final solution to the puzzle of how the universe is 
built, but its concepts must continue to change with 
each new discovery just as they did in the past. The 
photonics concept calls attention to recent 
discoveries that are very real but are not yet included 
in the quantum mainstream. When we add these to 
this great science we see that this insight into the 
workings of nature is so reasonable, so simple, and 
so obvious, that it could not possibly be otherwise.

REFERENCES

(1) Bahaa E. A. Saleh and Malvin Carl Teich, Fundamentals 
 of Photonics, New York, 1991.

(2) Albert Einstein, "Physics and Reality," Ideas and Opinions, 
New York, 1954.

(3) Robert Hofstadter, Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, 1993.

(4) Vernon Brown, "Hofstadter's Shells Revisited," Photonics, 
Cabot Arkansas, 1994.

(5) Albert Einstein, "Development of Our Conception of the 
Nature and Constitution of Radiation," Physikalische 
Zeitschrift 22, 1909. Translated by Christian Holm. 

(6) The World of Physics Vol. II, 1991
Page 311, H. Ziegler; "If one thinks about the basic 
particles of matter as invisible little spheres 
which possess an invariable speed of light, then all 
interactions of matter-like states and 
electrodynamic phenomena can be described..."

(7) Richard P. Feynman, QED, Princeton, 1985.

(8) Planck's Constant, 6.6260755 x 10-34  Joule seconds. 
June 1, 1992 Physical Review D.

(9) Samuel Devons, "Compton effect," Grolier Electronic 
Encyclopedia, 1993.The equation is: wavelength = h/mc 
where h is Planck's constant, m is mass and c is the speed 
of light. A shell made of a photon must then be of 
diameter = h/pi mc. Electron diameter is then 
7.7 x 10-11 centimeters.

(10) J.J. Thomson, Philos. Mag. 11, 299, 1881. Hendrick 
Lorentz,  The Theory of Electrons, Brill Leiden, 1909.

(11) Poincare considered a pulse of light, or a wave 
train, with energy E and momentum p. Recalling that, 
according to the Poynting theorem, p=E/c, and applying 
to the pulse of light the Newtonian relation, p=mv, 
Poincare concluded that a pulse of light with energy 
E has mass m=E/c2. Students of algebra will immediately 
see that this is the same equation as E=mc2.

(12) H. Poincare, Arch, Neerland, 5, 252, 1900. 
Lev B. Okun, "The Concept of Mass," Physics Today, June 1989.

(13) Albert Einstein, "Special Theory of Relativity," 
Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 17, 891, 1905.

(14) Vernon Brown, "Hofstadter's Shells Revisited," 
Feb. Photonics, Cabot AR 1994. Expanded treatment of 
these last four items are in this work.

(15) To get the answer, multiply .5 x .5 x .5 etc. 
once for each one. The final result is the probability 
that the whole is false.