Maxwell's fluid model of magnetism (2015)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
You might want to jump directly to point: https://youtu.be/NXdQfPrU64g?t=704
Courtesy of Planck, of course.
No. Absolutely not. This is where physicists get their history wrong and what the lecture explains.
When Planck described black-body radiation, he wrote that it was "as if" there were resonators in the walls that can oscillate at certain discrete frequencies. He did believe that light was a wave.
Even after Einstein published his paper much later, Planck and everyone else thought he was silly for almost twenty years. They accepted the photoelectric effect explanation but not how Einstein came to the result (photons).
You have to think how the ideas proceeded historically, not to try to retrofit current understanding backwards in time. For example, Isaac Newton believed light was composed of a stream of corpuscles, but he lost his case in 1801 when Young presented his double slit experiment.
Einstein's idea at that time was more correct and provided better explanations and predictions.
The important historical lesson is that Einstein had the correct idea and framework to think about light __at that time__ and advance physical theory, he wrote it down and people refused to accept it.
* 1900 Plank describes black-body radiation in a way where energy is quantized.
* 1905 Einstein describes light as having “corpuscular” nature and uses it to describe photoelectric effect.
* 1923 Compton effect discovered. Einsteins ideas about light quanta explain them perfectly. Everybody accepts that light is also a particle and Gilbert Lewis coins the word photon.
To me, it always felt like the latter, but I've never seen that written down explicitly, and everyone seems to talk like it's the former. I mean sure, 99.99% of the time experiments that emit or absorb photons are performed using atoms (and hence discrete electron orbitals) but that's certainly not the only way to create or or absorb photons. There's Cherenkov radiation, Bremsstrahlung, etc...
That means something a little different to "photons can only have specific energies" (that applies only to very specific atoms or atoms with certain structure; in many materials, electrons can exist in bands of continuous energy).
The book I referenced discusses both the early hydrodynamic model maxwell used for electrostatics and a rather bizarre (and intriguing) mechanical model involving flywheels and gears.
Can't comment on whether it linearizes the history though.
I guess my point is that QM took a long time, and work from a lot of people to reach the point it has. Any replacement will likely need a lot of work by a lot of people, and there don't seem to be very many people working outside the box. Or perhaps that's just because nobody wants to publish half-baked ideas. I'd rather see new ideas published and get shot down than yet another experiment confirming spooky action at a distance in some new configuration.
About 25 years.
> a lot of people
About a dozen.
> replacement
Somehow I am not holding my breath.
So as you see, I partially agree with you. The "spooky action" kind of experiments are stupid, but for the opposite reason!
>> "we should have a theory where everything is explained with natural numbers" which is the only object that his limited imagination can directly connect with reality.
That part though... Physics has a problem where the people practicing it can't even make a satisfactory connection to reality. Even from the outside we see this in debates about "interpretation" which go on among physicists. To be satisfied with the mathematics is one thing, to have a satisfactory connection back to reality is quite another. Don't let the beauty of the abstractions blind you to that.
As I said before if you really dig down deep, you'll realize that this is because our classical macroscopic quantities like "value of momentum", "magnetic moment" etc. are not the same things that exist "down there". The language of nature turns out to be much more subtle. Quantum Mechanics is really the best you can get when you try to hold on to the old classical ideas. Thus an alternative to QM would most likely have nothing to do with classical mechanics at all, it would need to be something entirely new.
When this insight goes mainstream (almost 200 years after it was discovered), stuff we reckon as science fiction today will become reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb...