foundations of physics and some new technology

Werbos, Paul J., and Ludmilla Dolmatova. "Analog quantum computing (AQC) and the need for time-symmetric physics." Quantum Information Processing 15.3 (2016): 1273-1287.

A few months ago, Luda and I raised some very fundamental questions about what we really know about how the universe works. I recently put it this way to some former colleagues at NSF: "In graduate school, they told us that the physics of electricity, magnetism and charged particles is totally a done deal, totally known, totally explained with high precision by Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). To learn anything new and fundamental, one should look at nuclear or gravitational physics. BUT -- having run the research program in applied QED, I learned very quickly that this was not true. It was NOT a done deal at all!"  And so our new paper proposed a new experiment crucial to resolving some of the outstanding questions. (By the way, Springer let me post the paper and some details at www.werbos.com/physics.htm, but not at places like arxiv.) It also raised major questions about where this takes us.

This past month, I had a chance to revisit some of those questions. Life being what it is, I have no plans for massive dissemination of what I have learned, but ... for whatever reason... after a pleasant evening, I do feel like posting a few key parts of what I have learned:

1. "MQED" works based on the USUAL Schrodinger equation of ordinary QED, married to a new measurement formalism. In other words, no need to change the usual Schrodinger equation at all (except to formulate it as "Louiville equation" in the density operator rho as in normal quantum optics); only to get rid of the collapse of the wave function and similar de facto models of macroscopic objects like polarizers and detectors.

2. That's for physics at the level of 3 femtometers or so, and above. Below that, of course, it is the nuclear realm, where I still support a radical viewpoint, viewing MQED as an emergent statistical description of 
something involving topological solitions, spinors and even twistors and of course W and B instead of A. Not the Lagrangians I have published yet, but variations of them. 

3. Under MQED, it does indeed seem possible to construct not only a forward-time camera by 
analog triphoton "ghost imaging", but even to make the old biphoton concept of "backward time telegram" work by relatively simple variations of what Yanhua Shih once proposed. But the biphoton ghost imaging for astronomy as recently proposed using thermal light is not predicted to offer such capabilities; it departs from the insights of Klyshko, which were crucial, and which are supported by MQED, but lost by folks who did not fully respect Klyshko. But ghost astronomy using simple BBO's and polarizers seems possible.

4. MQED easily shows why the concept of simulating asymmetric GHZ states by thermal light alone, without
nonlinear crustal component, cannot work. Under the old model, it should work, but the new model explains/predicts why it does not work.  Ironically, that is itself a decisive test of the new model versus the old model!

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So it's nice to know how the story comes out... and the progression to nuclear stuff is not so healthy on this planet now anyway. 

What next, now that this curiosity is gratified? Who knows? Will review some energy stuff and some food tomorrow, and then we'll see...