Counterintuitive Science & Gaslight Culture
by Asa Boxer
Today I’ll be taking you on a wee tour of a sciency article by Dr. Ethan Siegel on wavicles. I urge you to click on the link and take a look at Siegel’s self-branding. He presents as Dr. Woo himself, but he comes in a box with the following write up:
Ethan Siegel is a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!" He is a science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. He has won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for his blog, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics.
So he’s not just a science journalist. His blog is called Big Think, and the article in question is “The surprising origins of wave-particle duality”—which you can find here.
I can only scratch the surface by focusing on a few of the blunders in this article that are typical to believers in wavicle theory—which is mainstream and has been so for about a century. I advise you read the article, so you get a full sense of the piece: whether you do so before or after reading my article is your business. It depends whether you want to start with an unbiased read. For those even vaguely familiar with this subject, what Siegel has to offer is old hat. I couldn’t find anything “surprising.”
The overarching flaw in Siegel’s article is its simplification of the history of the development of the idea of the wave-particle duality. This story-telling component of science is something I explored in “Science & Textbook Pedagogy.” The value of examining a piece like this is that it exemplifies textbook science. If you’ll recall, one of the consequences of these false histories is how they promote the false notion of linear progression, where it appears that one idea was worked upon and developed by successive minds who passed along the material one to the next, perfecting it progressively along the way, so that now we have the really finally final Truth. All conundrums, false starts, critiques, fall backs on previously held paradigms, blunders, blind gropings, accidental discoveries (which are actually surprising) are erased and replaced with the myth of science as a linear accumulation of facts that lead to an inevitable, unquestionable conclusion.
For those who could use a quick primer: the wave-particle duality hypothesis proposes that energy and light sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle. What does that mean exactly? Siegel’s article is helpful to newbies, so take a look because the images are useful. To make it extremely brief: left to themselves, the phenomena of light and various energies propagate like waves with various wavelengths; when we measure them however, they behave like measured quantities (therefore “quanta” and “quantum”).
As I keep pointing out—and Newton warned about this problem in his “Principia”—we must be careful not to confuse the measuring device with the phenomenon. Clock time is not Time:
“those violate the accuracy of language, which ought to be kept precise, who interpret these words [time, space, place, and motion] for the measured quantities. Nor do those less defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truths, who confound real quantities with their relations [analogies] and sensible measures.”
Our arbitrary metrics are not space. If you find ways of measuring instrumentation-directed units of energy, you shouldn’t be surprised when those units behave like instrumentation-directed units. If the results are productive for engineering purposes, then great, but we needn’t get carried away and conclude that we’ve understood any metaphysical truth about reality.
Let’s say you’re watching a river flow or watching the interference patterns on a lake. If you take a drop of water out of that context and start breaking it down into smaller and smaller droplets, you’ve changed the context. Now you’re looking at particles. Should you really be surprised that when you broke the flow down into bits it started to behave differently? Do you now go around promoting an absurd metaphysic about a wave-particle duality? The duality is a figment of the experiment.
So that’s the basic issue here. There’s another critical element in play and that’s the problem of the aether—something Siegel conveniently omits from his tale of “surprising origins.” Modern physics makes the claim that light is a wave with no medium. How can a wave exist independently of an element that is disturbed into waves? It’s essential that you consider the absurdity of this concept. A wave is the disturbance of a medium—whether propagating through air or water or mud or sand, a wave is a shape that rises and falls and undulates through a medium. We call this “propagation,” and we call the speed of its movement, the “rate of propagation.” If we’re being accurate, it’s not “the speed of light” or “the speed of sound,” it’s the rate of propagation of light or sound. Without a medium, there can be no propagation, no wave. . . because, well, what is it that’s waving? But modern physics has declared that there is no medium—no aether. Indeed, aether physics is now considered bunk.
To deal with the nonsensical woo world of modern physics, Siegel invokes the concept of “counterintuitive”—a standard move in modern sciency discourse. The suggestion is that since it’s common sense to perceive the Earth as fixed and the sun as rotating about it, and since that instance of common sense proved wrong, science is all about debunking common sense conclusions. The best science, it is felt, is counterintuitive. In fact, the less sense it makes, the more scientific it must be. As quantum physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) put it: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” If you look online at the explanations for this statement, they read like priestly interpretations of some biblical forefather. Feynman, we are told, was communicating “pure knowledge”—something too subtle for mere mortal minds to comprehend. Apparently, there’s nothing mystical about “pure knowledge”; it’s something only scientists working with math can understand. I refer readers to the Pythagorean mysticism of mathematics (which I discussed here), which is where our modern worship of math as pure knowledge comes from. Essentially, it’s the belief that the physical world is an illusion, while the mathematical world—the world of forms—is the really true reality. This premise contradicts naturalism (the paradigm modern science is supposedly working with), which presents itself as pragmatic and grounded in physical phenomena.
Note the following graphics:
This is the standard textbook view of the photoelectric effect that according to Einstein establishes the quantum side of energy and light. From this experiment, the photon (or light particle) was born. You’ll note that instead of interference patterns, the cartoon gives us representations of lozenges and spheres, which represent quantum packets of energy. See here for a decent beginner’s explanation of the thinking involved. It boils down to the claim that since increasing either intensity or duration of light exposure doesn’t displace greater measures of electrical charge, light does not arise from a fluid medium. If it did, the fluid would, given enough time, fill up and inundate the experimental material (a metal sheet) and expel energy; or alternatively, with an increase in the amount of light, the material would likewise be flooded with one energy and expel another.
These were the predictions made by the aether theorists. But these predictions were wrong. Since the concept of a fluid medium like water and air failed to account for the observed phenomena, it was dropped and replaced with the quantum paradigm in certain cases. Since wave-particle duality accounted for more of the appearances mathematically, and since a philosophical trend became popular treating math as metaphysical Truth, this duality became a cornerstone of the modern sense of reality—a reality that is fundamentally counterintuitive and nonsensical. But what if, instead of shutting the door on this issue, it had been left open as a puzzle begging for potential resolutions?
It is of interest that Max Planck (1858-1947), who came up with the math to help account for energy phenomena (blackbody radiation theory), originally saw his math as a useful workaround, a kind of nifty trick or heuristic device that helped with calculations. He did not confuse the math for the reality itself (until that view became popular).
We’re back to the problem of sciency idol worship, a theme to which I keep returning: confusing the model with the phenomenon. The Electric Universe group has raised some intriguing challenges to this physics, but they’ve been vilified as pseudoscientists and there’s no conversation to be had.
As one probes the math, one inevitably finds probability calculations at work, and I finger this device as the nub of the problem if one is attempting to understand reality. . . as opposed to merely accounting for the appearances. Moreover, as with the Robert Millikan oil drop experiment, the hypothesis is unclear because the purpose of the scientific work is to establish a measurement—that is, it’s meant to quantise energy rather than test a proposition. In other words, analogically, the point of the experiment is to isolate drops and droplets from a river. Of course you’re going to discover the phenomena you’re creating in such circumstances.
I personally do not find it difficult to imagine various alternative explanations to the quantum solution to the photoelectric effect or the constant used to measure blackbody radiation. The aether is fluid-like—analogically—but not in the way we thought it was. Is that so extraordinary? Clearly, it has properties we don’t yet understand, and since we’ve defenestrated the concept altogether, we’ll never know. In the meantime, present physics has had to introduce the fictions of dark energy and dark matter to rescue a broken model. As I suggested last week, a house cleaning is in order.
I mention gaslighting in the title of this article because there’s something deeper I’d like to point to, which is a problem inherent to the notion of counterintuitive. The idea that one’s intuition is not to be trusted lies at the heart of all gaslighting. Indeed, the very point of gaslighting is to disrupt the inner conversation between one’s heart, gut, and brain. If you can convince a person that they can’t trust themselves, you can manipulate them. They become putty in your hands. As a consequence of this popular idea that the deepest insights are counterintuitive, our culture is a gaslighting culture—one that tells you that you can’t trust your gut, and you can’t trust your heart, and you can’t even trust your mind. . . because your instincts and intuitions are an accidental epiphenomenon of neural activity. True knowledge, pure knowledge is to be found in the mathematics, and it needn’t make sense. Therefore, you must believe in and trust TheScience™.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, this whole paradigm is absurd, and even sad. Math was invented, not discovered. It was invented to help us manipulate things and predict outcomes. Now we’ve given it a life of its own so that it leads us rather than the other way round. We are meant to use our tools, not be used by them. Moreover, if our minds are so unreliable—since they are a mere accidental epiphenomenon—then mathematics itself must be part of the fantastic illusion those minds have fabricated, and all our science babble is utter nonsense and chasing after the wind. This is a sad conclusion because it implies, Why bother? Any honest consideration of the present paradigm must end in laughter because it’s so clear how far we’ve fallen from the investigations of natural philosophy, and how caught up we are in a glass bead game.
Next time you hear the term counterintuitive or are tempted to use it, stop a moment to consider what you’re hearing or saying. Make it a topic of conversation with friends and family. It’s time we quit deploying the term because it’s damaging. It’s disrupting our self-reliance and making us slaves to any dubious ideas that claim the imprimatur of science.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Like an impetuous kid in a candybox sampler, i like all the different ideas but one usually jumps out at me. This time it was "...The duality is a figment of the experiment.....". That's so satisfying.
I mean...in some sense, *everything* has a wave/particle duality. Is it a bunch of leaves, or isn't the tree really "waving at me"? Are the evanescent mesmerizing shifting of contrasts in a murmuration a wave, or isn't it really "just a bunch of birds"? Scale matters, in both time and space.
A bit out of left field, this, but:
I do SO wish I could read a physics journal from 200 years from now about how we finally figured out Carver Mead (Collective Electrodynamics) or Williamson/Van der Mark (Quicycle approach) was exactly correct and that all this "dark" nonsense and hyper-mathematical elk-fighting would come to an end.
I took your advice, dear Asa, and read the Siegel article before reading your critique. In fact I've been reading about the 'wavicle' for a while now and I still don't get it. As a science 'newbie' or somebody who lacks knowledge and self-confidence when it comes to reading about science, I nonetheless suspect that the wavicle is nonsense. Still I find myself wondering, 'Gee whiz, but that Siegel guy sounds pretty smart as he summarizes what sounds like a very complex scientific theory, maybe too complex for my science-ignorant brain to understand, so shouldn't I defer to what he says with his use of all that technical terminology about this impressive-sounding 'wave-particle duality' theory which maybe lies beyond my comprehension?' I mean, shouldn't I be humble and open-minded when it comes to knowledge way out of my wheelhouse? But if the wavicle still sounds silly after reading about it for a while, then where does the folly lie? After the covid scam and the climate scam and the overpopulation scam and all the other scams being foisted on us by the religion of science, it seems that people like myself with little background in science should nonetheless start having more confidence in ourselves as independent thinkers. If you take the time to read as much as you can about the 'wavicle' and it still sounds like bullshit, then maybe that's because it is. Reading your essays every week certainly gives me more confidence in that regard.