"We cannot begin to make that same assertion for the nuclear realm. There are people who will defend QCD far more ferociously and unscrupulously than I have ever seen anyone defend general relativity. They will tell you that “QCD has been confirmed endless times, and of course it has predicted everything correctly.”
But in reality, it has only managed to fit a relatively meager set of things it has tried to predict, and there are major empirical indications which cast doubt even on the things we do know how to test with QCD. Following the scientific method, we should be giving top priority to exactly those kinds of experiments which cast the most doubt, and would pave the way either to greater certainty or to an improved theory.
(One thing is for sure. We know from the existence of dark matter and dark energy that there is something out there beyond the scope of the standard model. How else could we hope to find out what it is, if we do not probe our areas of weakness and doubt first?) But this is not being done.
Even though I had taken a graduate course in nuclear physics at Harvard, I was still quite surprised years ago when I read a then-new book by Makhankov et al (The Skyrme Model) describing the present realities of nuclear physics.
(Makhankov was then director of a crucial piece of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, JINR, Dubna, one of the world’s very top centers.) He explained how QCD was utterly useless for predicting or explaining the wide range of nuclear phenomena they focused on there. These included “low and medium energy” scattering, where “low energy” includes what we would see in an H bomb or a fusion reactor. We are all obliged to start with a prayer to QCD, insallah, and prove that we are among the faithful before our work can be published, but many empirical researchers really wonder if there is any connection at all between the world we actually live in and that mythical paradise.
More concretely, the challenge of predicting and explaining the masses and lifetimes of the hadrons is a central challenge in physics today, as important as the challenge of explaining atomic spectra (colors) was at the start of the twentieth century. Some thought that this was a minor part of physics at the time, but it is what really led to quantum mechanics. But could it be that we are offered a similar revolution in understanding, and will never achieve it, because we are now too jaded to take that kind of empirical challenge seriously enough? Why has the careful empirical work of Palazzi and MacGregor not received the level of deep appreciation, respect and follow-up that it deserves from people trying to formulate general theories of physics? "
"But here are the weird things, which I tend to despair of orthodox physics of accepting.
First, the time-forwards dynamics implied by the classical fields and the P mapping (the free space master equations derived in the most recent paper at arXiv.org by myself and Ludmilla) are not really relevant to the statistics we observe
macroscopically
in experiments. That is because the conventional notion of time-forwards causality simply does not work at that level.
(Our notion of time & cause & effect... if it doesnt work on the sub-microscopic level, or the sub macroscopic, as this article states, how can we assume it to work on the macroscopic, or in our reality ?
Once you go past the curvature of space, either sub-microscopically, or sub macroscopically, time forwards causality ceases to exist, it also ceases to exist outer macroscopically, it's only when it is distorted within a narrow range by the curvature of space we get the illusion of time & causality - Roony)
Second, what does work is the quantum Boltzmann equation. For any pure classical state, {p, j} across all space, we know that Tr(r(p,j)H) equals its energy. Thus the classical Boltzmann equation is exactly the same as the grand ensemble quantum Boltzmann equation.
If we consider what patterns of correlation, causality, and scattering networks occur within a periodic space of volume V, and let V go to infinity, we can see that all the scattering predictions and spectral predictions of quantum field theory are embedded in the quantum statistical mechanics.
Consideration of the eigenfunctions of H is essentially just a calculating device for characterizing the properties of the quantum Boltzmann equation, which are exactly equivalent to the classical one here. (Caveat: the usual invariant measures do happen to be equivalent, as noted in the earlier paper by Ludmilla and myself. However, the set of density matrices considered allowable in quantum theory is more than just the set which are reachable as P transforms of allowable classical probability distributions; see my arXiv paper on the Q hypothesis. This may or may not have important implications here, where the Boltzmann density is itself P-reachable; this is a question I need to look into more.). What is most exciting here is that a purely bosonic theory with a small h(¶mQa)2 term added may give us what we need for a completely valid quantum field theory on the one hand, and that a quantum Boltzmann distribution based on that same Hamiltonian may be exactly equivalent to the same statistical distribution we expect for the corresponding classical PDE;
thus a full “return to reality” may well be possible, not just at the level of philosophical possibilities, but at the level of specific well-posed PDE which fit empirical reality better than today’s “standard model of physics.”
Unfortunately – this is the conclusion which emerges from combining the various threads I have been exploring, each one of which already stretches the present fabric of physics because it connects areas that are not often connected in today’s overspecialized world."
