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A thinking on Quantum Physics and common sense

Article in Advanced Research Journal · March 2025

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Carlo Artemi
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Article

A thinking on Quantum Physics and common sense

Article History
Abstract Received 16.12.2024
The author attempts to answer the questions there are in the title of this paper. Accepted 17.02.2025
These questions are questions that scientists and philosophers have been asking
themselves for many decades since Quantum Mechanics was formulated to Keywords
explain the phenomena of the atomic and subatomic world. First of all a short Quantum physics;
but complete historical review of the transition between Classical Mechanics interpretation of physics;
and Quantum Mechanics there is. It is preceded by some of the methodological physics models;
premises that fit a certain vision of science. Then the author examines the issues probabilism; realism
and debates that have occurred on aspects of quantum mechanics such as
realism, non-locality and probabilism (in contrast to determinism of Classic
Mechanics). In doing this author llustrates the foundations of the various
interpretations of quantum mechanics which, in an attempt to resolve these
problems, have been given. The absurdities, and conflicts with the common
sense, of quantum mechanics are shown to be largely apparent. In doing this,
we examine the analogies of classical physics, as well as those of everyday life.
Recent experimental results are taken into consideration. It is concluded that
Quantum Mechanics presents elements of rupture more with Classical Physics
than with the everyday experience.

Introduction
When we talk about quantum physics or contemporary physics in general in any context and
especially in dissemination, it practically always happens that we use or hear words such as
strange, counter-intuitive, apparently absurd, and abstract. Some have stated and maintain
that in Quantum Mechanics (henceforth QM), the cause-effect principle does not apply. Others
have stated that an objective reality independent of the observer no longer exists, while others
have used QM to build New Age visions of reality. But are these really the facts? Is QM really
such an odd theory and so far from common sense? In this article, we will see that this is not
really the case.
When starting a complex discussion, it is good to establish a starting point. The author has
written books on what science or rather the scientific method is (Artemi 2012, 2024). Starting
from the apparently banal fact that science is not a set of statements but is, above all, a method
(the only one that has proven able of greatly expanding our knowledge of reality), it is
necessary to clarify, as stated and reiterated by the author, that science, and especially physics,
while making observations, measurements and experiments on phenomenal reality, does not
work on phenomena but on models of reality. Examples of models are the material point, the
uncompressible fluid, the ideal gas, as well as the models used in the study of the economy
_____________
Corresponding Author Carlo Artemi 🖂 Ministero Pubblica Istruzione, Viterbo, Italy

This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.

and society. The validity of a model is not linked to its beauty or to its logic but to its ability to
describe and organize experimental facts in a unitary way, and its ability to reduce many
phenomena to a few causes. The material point is an absurdity: how is it possible that an object
that has no dimension can exist and have inertia? The rigid body model is absurd because its
ability to move, even if the force is applied only to one part of it, implies interactions
propagating with infinity speed which is against all common sense. In Relativity, the rigid
body is not even studied (Goldstein, 1971). A different model, Born Rigidity, needs to be
introduced (Born, 1909)
This work with models involves space-time too. Newton, as is well-known at the beginning of
his Principia, writes about a “true, absolute and mathematical” space and about a time that
“flows independently of what happens.” As Mach understood centuries later (Mach, 1901)
,these statements are metaphysics, and they are ideas. Mach stated that absolute space and
absolute time are not measured, whereas the distances between objects and the time intervals
between events are. If the author had lived in Mach’s time and could have answered him, he
would have said “Dear Mach, the fact that objects exist at a certain distance from each other
demonstrates that this happens in a certain environment which is the one in which we live.
The mathematical description of this environment is something completely different. The
model of Euclidean, continuous, three-dimensional space with a temporal dimension
independent of the phenomena attached is a model that is very good in Physics. If, from the
study of the perihelion of Mercury or of the ether wind and other phenomena, we will see
situations and phenomena requiring a new model of space-time, for example, discrete or non-
Euclidean or 5-, 6- or 10-dimensional space, a new model will need to be adopted.

A Bit of History
Summing up entire books on the history of science, we can say that QM was born when it
became evident that microscopic systems, electrons, atomic nuclei and atoms had behaviors
that could not be explained by the models of Classical Physics. They behaved according to the
situation, such as appearing to involve two deeply different models of Classical Mechanics
(henceforth MC), the material point (corpuscle) model and the wave model. The electrons in
cathode ray tubes are the material points. In beam collision experiments, they present
diffraction and interference phenomena. Inside the atoms are standing waves on a wire or on
a circular surface. This dual behavior accounts for an impressive series of phenomena
including the light spectra of atoms. From a mathematical point of view, the Schrodinger
equation, the Heisenberg matrix formalism and then Dirac’s unitary vision explain all of these
behaviors but there has been a discussion about the physical meaning of this. Some have
argued for its inability to explain things and see the quantum state of a system as little more
than a mathematical idea, an element of a Hilbert space. This is the standard or Copenhagen
interpretation, which is the most adopted. Some have hypothesized the existence of phantom
hidden variables (like viruses in ancient Rome which we will discuss) that influence the
behavior of quantum systems, an interpretation formalized in particular by Bohm
(Bohm,1952). Some have hypothesized the existence of many universes or many worlds, and
that the measurements of a quantum system have made it possible “to jump” from one world
to another (Everett, 1957).
Each of these interpretations obviously has strong and weak points (Rovelli, 2020). For
example, the standard interpretation associates a wave function ψ with each quantum system
12 C. ARTEMI

such that the value that its square modulus has at a point in space-time given the probability
density that the system has when it is observed at that point in space-time. One can argue that
it is not clear what meaning the wave function of the entire universe can have, and that it is
not clear what the wave function of a macroscopic system includes for the observer (for
example, the Milky Way). The above formulation seems to highlight the need for each
quantum system to have an observer who can measure its position using all philosophical
problems this creates. Furthermore, the standard interpretation is probabilistic as is clearly
evident when the temporal evolution of the system is analyzed by the mathematical formalism
of the path integrals created by Feyman. We need to focus on this.

First of all, let’s see what is meant by deterministic theory and probabilistic theory. A theory
describing certain phenomena is deterministic if, given the initial state of a system at time t1
and knowing the conditions that will exist between t1 and t2, it is able to predict precisely
what the state of the system will be at time t2. The theory will be probabilistic if it is only
capable of predicting the probability that, at time t2, the system will be in one of the certain
states, even infinite ones. We also tell what local and non-local theories there are. We will need
these definitions later. Simplifying but not distorting things, we can say that a local scientific
theory is one in which, beyond a certain distance, objects no longer have an influence on the
system under examination. Obviously if the opposite is true, the theory will be not-local.

We return to Feyman who, in 1942 for his thesis work (Feyman, 1942) attempted a different
approach than his predecessors to QM. The starting idea of Feyman’s new approach derives
from the least action principle. It is a principle that has been rigorously stated in the last years
of the eighteenth century by Lagrange and is a practical method for describing the motion of
a point alternative to Newton’s laws. In practice, a function called Lagrangian, the difference
between kinetic energy and potential energy, is considered and its stated trajectory that a point
follows to go from the starting position to the arrival is the trajectory that minimizes the
integral of the Lagrangian density (called ‘action’) that is calculated along the same trajectory.
This proves that this principle is equivalent to Newton’s laws in the sense that the principle is
derived from Newton’s laws and that Newton’s laws are derived from the principle. It should
be underlined the introduction of the least action principle, perfected and expanded on in the
nineteenth century by Hamilton and others, caused a debate at the time (Glick, 2023) because
the question was asked, “How is it possible that at instant t1, the object knows where it will be
at instant t2 and above all, how does he know the values of the integral on all trajectories?”
This shows that even in CM discussions, there have been doubts. Feyman modified the least
action principle, arriving at the path integrals method. The idea is that a particle does not travel
on just one path ( having a wave-like, i.e. extended, nature) to go from one point to another in
space-time. It travels every possible one: each with a probability that depends on the value of
action on that path. So the particle, or in general the quantum system, will go from the initial
state to the final state with a probability given by the sum (integral) of the action on all possible
paths. In this way, Feyman rediscovered the Schrodinger equation.
The probabilism of QM has aroused strong doubts in many scholars including Einstein himself
who uttered the phrase, “God cannot have played dice when he created the Universe.” Bohr
responded by saying “Who are you to say to God what should he do?” Neglecting this
exchange, Einstein was convinced that QM was an incomplete theory in the description of
nature, with this incompleteness quantified by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He
 ADVANCED RESEARCH JOURNAL 13

invented the EPR paradox which has been, for decades, the most insidious criticism of QM or
rather, of its standard interpretation. We will return to this very important paradox later.

The microscopic objects constituting matter have a dual behavior and the nature of light also
appears similar. The nature of light had been the subject of speculation since ancient times and
from Newton to the nineteenth century, there have been two opposing views on light and
similar radiations that were discovered in the nineteenth century: the corpuscular theory and
the wave-like one. In the nineteenth century, the discovery of the phenomena of birefringence,
interference, polarization and the measurement of the speed of light in water led to the
abandonment of corpuscular theory for wave theory. But this theory had an enormous
problem: in classical physics, a wave must be the mechanical vibration of a medium and for
light, the existence of the luminiferous ether was assumed, an imaginary medium that filled
the entire universe and was 100,000 times more rigid than steel but did not hinder the motion
of the planets. Despite this, early 20th century physicists were convinced that the luminiferous
aether was real to such an extent that a citizen geologist scientist tried to trace the force of
gravity back to the aether-matter interaction (Del Pretto, 1904).

Even Maxwell’s discovery of the electromagnetic nature of light did not lead to a change of
ideas. Maxwell found equations for electric and magnetic forces and found the solutions of
these equations to be similar to those that described waves. The speed of these electromagnetic
waves was equal to light speed, and this could not be a coincidence. However, Maxwell’s
equations were derived from the hypothesis of the luminiferous aether and from some
formulas of classical mechanics (Braccesi, 1968). It was the unlikely properties of the ether, the
experimental difficulties of finding evidence of the ether-matter interaction (Resnick, 1969),
and the affirmation of Relativity that led to abandoning the idea of the ether.
Further research on the photoelectric effect, on fluorescence, on the Compton effect and others
brought in evidence of the corpuscular behavior of light which made the ether hypothesis
useless, highlighting the dual nature of light too. After the 1930s, the need arose to unify QM
with Relativity to be able to treat the quanta of light and matter in a single way. All of this was
achieved thanks to the Feyman mechanism with the quantum field theory or second
quantization (henceforth QFT) which led to modifying the dual wave-particle model which
arrived from Einstein and his collaborators. The strongest criticism of QM and the
Copenhagen interpretation was the EPR paradox (Einstein, 1935) which paved the way for the
phenomenon of quantum entanglement. To understand quantum entanglement, we start from
a classical analogue cited by Wikipedia, used in educational videos (Baldi, 2022).
Two friends have two balls, one white and one black, and they divide them at random without
looking at them. One then leaves and goes to a place very far from Earth, it could be Mars or
the Andromeda galaxy. As soon as one of the two looks at his own ball, he instantly knows
which ball the other has. There is a distant link between the two balls but this is not absurd
because whoever looks at the ball looks at the result of a choice that has already done some
time before on Earth. Let’s move on to the quantum case. Here, we have a well-defined initial
system, which produces two quantum systems that have momentum as a property. Let’s
assume that initially, the momentum or, rather, a component of the momentum along a chosen
axis is zero. By momentum conservation law, if one of the objects created has momentum
directed upwards, the other will have it directed downwards. The two quantum objects head
in opposite directions, and after some time, they reach two observers who are very far from
14 C. ARTEMI

each other (one on Mars and the other on Venus). The time taken to measure the component
of the impulse is less than the time light takes to travel from one observer to another. Here, the
observer who is on Mars, having made his measurement, will instantly know the result of the
measurement made on Venus but with a big difference compared to the classical case. The
result of the measurement process is determined at the same moment as the observation and
the value obtained does not pre-exist the measurement itself.
It almost seems as though there is a “spooky action at distance,” words used by Einstein, that
connect the two systems. This connection has been called entanglement but it is in contrast to
relativity. The criticism refers to a simple system but is very targeted and puts the supporters
of QM, or rather of its ability to describe reality, in a position of great difficulty. Bohr initially
responded that the criticism was right but the experiment was impossible to carry out (Bohr,
1935). In the following decades, experiments similar to the one proposed by Einstein were
carried out, (Aspect, 1982; Colciagi, 2023; Freedman, 1972) and it turned out that entanglement
really exists and some of its practical uses have been proposed (Piveteau,2023). Obviously, the
suspicion may arise that even in the quantum case, the states are decided at the departure of
the two objects perhaps with a probabilistic distribution of the results. Bell (Bell,1964) found
and published inequalities that should have been tested for if indeed the results were random
but predetermined. Very recently (it can be seen a list of these experiments in wikipedia.en
issue “ Bell tests “), experiments have been carried out in which Bell’s inequalities have been
disproved while the QM predictions have been confirmed. It therefore seems that ghostly
action at a distance is real and we will return to this point.
Regarding the second quantization, we follow an argument made in (Tung, 2021)). Let’s
imagine observing a single particle and decreasing the inaccuracy Δx with which we measure
its position. We can imagine using increasingly precise tools. Obviously, due to Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle, the particle will acquire an impulse Δp and therefore an increasingly
greater energy. A certain point will be reached in which the energy will be sufficient to create
other particles due to the mass-energy equivalence. So if we want to combine Relativity and
QM, it is not possible to consider single particles but rather fields of particles.

Then there is another problem. Let’s start with a seemingly banal question. Why is every
electron the same? Equal electric charge, equal spin, equal sensitivity to forces, equal mass. Yet
among electrons (we could say the same thing for protons, quarks or neutrinos), there are
objects that have had a completely different history. Some have been produced billions of
years ago in a distant galaxy, and others have been produced a few minutes ago in particle
accelerators. This cannot be explained but if we admit that we are dealing with quanta, with
fundamental elements, and with small pieces of a field that has existed since the Big Bang and
extends over the entire Universe, then it is obvious that the smallest pieces of the same field
are equal . From a formal point of view, to achieve quantization of the fields, we operated on
the Lagrangians and it was discovered that Schrodinger and Dirac’s equations could easily be
interpreted as equations of matter fields. The existence of antimatter is easily explained too
because if the matter field is vectorial and therefore has several components, then some of
these correspond to ordinary matter (electron) and others to the corresponding antimatter
(positron). Using Feyman’s formalism, it is possible to describe the interactions between
particles very well and very precisely, creating what is today called the standard model of
particles and forces.
 ADVANCED RESEARCH JOURNAL 15

Some thinking

So far, we have engaged in a historical summary, albeit a very brief one, of the changes in the
models used to describe reality from Classical Mechanics to QM. It is time to explore some
reflections to answer the questions that are in the title of this paper. Let’s start with the alleged
“absurdities” that exist in QM. We have already said that the material point model, which is
fundamental in CM, contains absurdities. Let’s consider the very well-known formula of the
gravitational force between two points:
F = Gm1m2/r2
This is the formula explaining almost all motions in the sky, the movements of every object
that man has sent into space, and the force of weight with all of its consequences in the
calculations of engineers. However, it can be seen that:

a) the gravitational force of the point on itself is infinite, and this recalls the singularity of the
Schwarzschild metric, which is the basis of the theory of black holes.

b) infinite energy needs to detach part of the material point from the rest.

c) the gravitational force between two points is never equal to zero whatever the distance, with
the language used above in Newton’s theory of universal gravitation being non-local.

Just to give an example, if you calculate the gravitational acceleration that people feel of a
small household appliance placed at a certain distance, you will find a value that is comparable
to the acceleration that the same people feels by the Andromeda galaxy. To put in some
numbers, if the household appliance mass is 1 kg, the distance between me and the household
appliance is 10 meters, the mass of the Andromeda galaxy is 10 12 solar masses, the distance
between me and Andromeda is 2 million light years, paired with the data for the mass of the
sun and the conversion light years – meters and the cost G, we have the following:

For acceleration due to Andromeda, 3.3*10-13 in MKS system units.

For acceleration due to the appliance, 1.3*10-13 in MKS system units.

It is clear that the effects that distant masses can have on daily life can be neglected not so
much because of their low value (there are millions of galaxies that weigh as much as
Andromeda, not to mention the stars of our Milky Way that are less heavy but closer and more
numerous). The fact is that these far effects add up as vectors, so then the two effects with
same intensity but in opposite directions cancel out, therefore a non-local theory in practice
becomes a local theory. We can think the same thing happens to quantum entanglement
because if an electron that makes up my body can be connected to an electron of a hypothetical
inhabitant of Andromeda, it can also be connected to an electron of a hypothetical inhabitant
of the Magellanic Cloud, and the two effects cancel each other out. There are two very strong
indications that this is happening.

Since the first experiments on cathode rays, which are electrons, which took place 150 years
ago, observations and measurements have been made of quantum systems in millions of cases,
and the anomaly that can be explained by disturbing effects due to the entanglement of the
system with far systems has never been observed. Furthermore, millions of macroscopic
devices have been produced which base their operation on QM (lasers, superconducting
16 C. ARTEMI

magnets, tunnel diodes, electronic microscopes, and don’t forget all electronic components
based on transistor or optoelectronic components related to the photoelectric effect), and an
anomaly created by entanglement has never been observed. In short, someone who claims to
base New Age visions on QM and who doesn’t sleep at night thinking about its possible
connections with living beings who knows where (Rovelli,2020 B) is simply wrong.

There are those who think that entanglement signals can be sent at instantaneous speed,
therefore contradicting Relativity and introducing a contradiction within Contemporary
Physics. There are many informative books and videos (Balbi, 2022; Brown, 2002) where it is
explained that entanglement signals cannot be sent, Here, we can limit ourselves to observing
that in measuring the impulse of an electron connected to another, I do not “write” a message
that can reach the other electron and in any case, some time passes from the departure of the
connected electron until the moment in which I measure its property. Any signal would still
have a travel time. If we think about the “spooky action at distance” that seems to really exist,
it is enough to read Newton’s Principia to realize that the Newtonian theory of gravitation
admits, and indeed predicts, action at distance. A historical reminder is needed here. Before
Newton, Descartes (Descartes, 1644/Ferlin, 2020) had already formulated a theory of gravity
in which it was thought that the Solar System was filled with a fluid and that vortexes of the
liquid generated the motions of the planets, without any remote action. As Voltaire testifies in
English Letters, this vision was the most widespread in continental Europe at the beginning
of the eighteenth century. Voltaire writes (Voltaire , 1734) “whoever goes from Paris to London
leaves a full Universe and finds an empty one.”

Remote action is therefore an integral part of CM. It was put into a state of crisis by the studies
on electrical, luminous and magnetic phenomena which led to the concept of field in the
nineteenth century. Einstein’s relativity then excluded remote action and placed a limit on the
interaction’s speed. So the non-locality of QM almost seems like a return to CM, and perhaps
this annoyed Einstein. Furthermore, the same discussion that we made above for gravitational
attraction due to distant masses can be applied to entanglement with one addition. If the force
of gravity cannot be shielded from entanglement in a certain sense, then it can be canceled out
because the particle in its motion clearly interacts with other particles and it will be intertwined
with them too. The intertwined states are therefore particular states that are very “delicate”
and susceptible to being canceled out. This must be considered in experimental checks. In fact,
the non-locality of entanglement is not operational for practical purposes. On the other hand,
the QFT vision of particles such as the quanta of fields that clearly extend throughout the
Universe and have existed since throughout the Universe and have existed since the Big Bang
is a non-local vision and it must be taken into account that even space-time, referring to
General Relativity, can be seen as the field of gravitational forces. Moving on to the leap
between determinism and probabilism, this is a real leap but we can ask ourselves, is it a leap
compared to CM or is it compared to everyday reality? Is the cause-effect relationship
invalidated?

Let’s start with the cause-effect relationship, and we can immediately see that it still exists. We
consider a quantum event as the production and then detection of the Higgs boson in a particle
accelerator. We have a proton-antiproton pair that “collides” (cause), we have the kinetic
 ADVANCED RESEARCH JOURNAL 17

energy of the couple higher than the energy corresponding to the rest mass of the boson
(contributing cause) and obviously we can see that the standard model is valid (another
contributing cause). The production of the Higgs boson is there (effect). If there is no cause or
one of the contributing causes, the effect does not occur. The difference with the classical case
is that if I collide a very high number of pairs (billions), only in a very few cases will I have the
Higgs boson particle in the final state. I will be able to have the final states of other already
known particles, perhaps with the top quark or the intermediate vector bosons, or even events
in which nothing happens because the proton and antiproton simply exchange part of the
momentum (elastic collision). This is because the phenomena is probabilistic, therefore there
is a certain probability (cross-section) that there is a Higgs boson, an intermediate W vector
boson, a top quark etc. Obviously, the peculiarity remains. From the same well-defined cause,
there can be effects that very different and the same effect can have different causes.

Now we move from a quantum event to a political event, and find a practically identical
situation. Party X increases their votes from 3.5 to 25% of the votes, which is a notable increase.
This is an effect that can even be measured with absolute precision because the number of
votes is a natural number. To understand the cause, we did an opinion poll of a representative
sample of the new voters and asked explicitly why they voted for that party. The experience
of daily life tells us that we can have all kinds of answers, such as patronage (election
promises), sympathy (for the leader or a candidate), adherence (to the general program or
some of its points), protest (it is the only opposition party) or random (I didn’t know which to
vote for, I chose randomly) and more. One effect can have several causes and we certainly
cannot forget the observation done in one of the articles by the great Italian physicist Ettore
Majorana: (Majorana, 1942) “In a perfectly deterministic world, man’s free will would make
no sense.”

Therefore probabilism breaks with CM but not with everyday reality. Probabilism is a
guarantee of man’s freedom. Let’s get to the most important point, that reality is independent
of the observer. We have already said that the characteristics of this reality, which has been
measured, are one thing, while the existence of a phenomenal reality isn’t created by the
observer but influences him even if unobservable. We can then speak about a reality
independent of the observer. Entire books can be written on what “reality” is and what the
observer is (Rovelli, 2020). It is necessary to repeat some things. At the time of the ancient
Romans and in the European Middle Ages, one would not suspect that microbes or viruses
existed. Despite this, infectious diseases existed and caused many deaths. This is an
unobservable reality, a hidden variable one might say, that exists and has influenced people.
On the other hand, the vast majority of objects constituting the Universe were not visible to
the ancients, nor they could influence their lives, but we certainly cannot think that in
inventing the telescope, man created galaxies and stars not visible to the naked eye, or the
planets.It is trivial to say that reality may appear different to multiple observers but it is useful
to remind using some examples to understand how this diversity can be strong.

The measurements of a characteristic quantity of a system done by different observers can give
different results like the measurement of the frequency of a wave emitted by a source done by
two observers, where the results (Doppler effect) are different. The state of motion of an object
depends on the observer because motion is relative. With examples taken from everyday life,
18 C. ARTEMI

this is taught in he first year of physics in high school. The color of an object can vary
depending on the angle at which it is looked from because the reflected light can have a
different spectral composition than the transmitted one. The author remembers having
observed, when he was a student, a thin vinyl record which, when looked at in a reflection,
was blue-violet and when looked at in transparency, was red.

The simultaneity between two events can be judged differently by two moving observers.
There is an important example by Einstein (Einstein, 1981) which is reported here with a slight
modification because it can have an important variant. Let us consider (see Figure 1 ) the
carriage of a train of length L, measured when it is motionless, as well as people O motionless
on the station platform and people O1 inside the carriage. Both observers are equidistant from
the ends.

Figure 1. Einstein example

Suppose that, when the train is stationary, two bolts of lightning strike simultaneously and
strike points A and B of the carriage respectively, which correspond to points A1 and B1 of the
platform. Both observers agree that the two events occurred simultaneously because the light
from the lightning had to travel the same distance. If instead of light the two observers had
listened to the sounds of two gunshots, then nothing would have changed. Let us now imagine
the train was moving at a constant speed v towards B, with reference to the observer on the
ground (the inertial reference system is the platform). Just when the two observers are in front
of each other, two bolts of lightning strike the ends of the carriage. Let’s also assume that for
O1, the lightning bolts that strikes the ends of the carriage are simultaneous, therefore he
perceives them at the same time. Observer O states that the lightning at B happened first. This
is explained because the observer is moving towards B and away from A, therefore the ray of
light emitted at point B reaches O before that of A. If the two observers had been blindfolded
and had to judge only by the sounds, then nothing would have changed. If instead of the train
we put one of them on a plane traveling at supersonic speed, then the observer on the plane
would never have been able to hear the sound coming from A, and the two observers would
have disagreed not only on the simultaneity but even on the existence of two events. On the
other hand, as seems to be very important to the author, since the 1950s to today, individual
atoms, i.e. a quantum system, have been photographed (see Figure 2) by electron microscopes
(Jacoby,2005), obtaining photos such this:
 ADVANCED RESEARCH JOURNAL 19

Figure 2. Example of a photo of atoms

Recently, atoms have been photographed at the moment at which they exchange an electron
to carry out a chemical reaction (Kiesewetter, 2018). Using electric fields and lasers, we are
able to move individual atoms in a way to make a word appear (Eigler, 1990). We can even
put them in a line by creating a magnetic field meter (Schaffner, 2024). Now I can photograph
and manipulate a real object, not an idea or an element of Hilbert space. I can photograph a
beautiful place or a beautiful people but not the beauty itself, therefore quantum objects are
real objects, not abstractions.

In recent times, it has become possible to photograph wave-particle dualism (Verstraten, 2024)
and quantum entanglement itself (Zia, 2023). Because of its importance, let us describe the
scheme of the experiment in which the dual behavior of the individual atoms was
photographed by verifying the validity of Schrodinger’s equation too. They cooled lithium
atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero using lasers to extract their energy. Then they
trapped them in an optical lattice, a bit like a complex game of ping-pong where the balls are
the atoms and the rackets are beams of light. Having trapped them, they turned the lattice off
and on periodically, observing the atoms move from the particle state to the wave state. More
precisely, they saw the individual atoms make apparently random shifts with respect to their
equilibrium positions. They derived from these shifts a position probability distribution, and
they found a perfectly identical function, within the limits of experimental uncertainties,
related to the solution of the Schrodinger equation. For the potential corresponding to the
20 C. ARTEMI

atom-light interaction, there is a potential practically equal to the harmonic oscillator potential.
This result was highlighted by a series of images (see Figure 3), one of which was placed on
the cover of Nature magazine which announced the result.

Figure 3. Photo of atom in wavw corpuscolar behaviours

This is just the beginning. Physicists predict that this imaging technique can be used to study
even more complex systems.

Conclusion

Let’s try, using everything that has been said, to answer the questions in the title of this article.
Summing up, we can say that: The existence of an objective reality such that its laws aren’t
influenced by the observer (the first postulate of Relativity) and such that it is not created by
the observer, is not denied by QM. What is reiterated and expanded is that reality is more
complex than CM tells us because the evolution of reality is probabilistic. Elements of non-
locality appear in the laws that regulate it. Quantum non-locality, like that of universal
gravitation, does not have any effects for practical purposes. The probabilism of QM, far from
creating problems, could be both a guarantee of man’s free will and a link between the natural
sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) and the so-called human sciences (sociology,
political science, economic and legal studies), possibly using non-linear physics as a “bridge”
because the great majority of physical models used to describe socio-economic systems are
non-linear. Quantum systems are neither abstract entities nor unobservable, and they can even
be photographed. The measurement of the individual quantities that characterize them is
obviously influenced by the uncertainty relations. A cause-effect relationship between events
continues to exist but it is more complex than classical logic and CM. QM therefore does not
appear to the author to be either very strange or counterintuitive. Even elements such as the
existence of antimatter, spin and virtual particles, with the associated Casimir effects, which
were not discussed in this paper, can be framed in a logical and simple way by the second
quantization. If we enter the model of the vector particle that of a single quantum system, i, it
is obvious that the v electron vector has components that have two verses. In the case of the
electron, the two components are the electron of ordinary matter and the positron of the
antimatter.
 ADVANCED RESEARCH JOURNAL 21

Declarations
Acknowledgments: At the end of this paper, I would like to give special thanks not to particular
people or to an institution but to the Internet. The author is not an academic. He does not work
for a university or a research center but, through the Internet, he has obtained and continues
to obtain updates on recent experimental results, information contained in articles produced
by colleagues, the possibility of contact with organizations and research centers, etc. All of this
has allowed the author and others in the same conditions to be open to the scientific
community, and everything that derives from it.
Authors’ contributions: All aspects of this article were performed by the sole author.
Competing interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public,
commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Publisher’s note: Advanced Research Journal remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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