Caroline H Thompson
Web site: http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1
About Myself
19:06:00
I was born
in England in 1943. I was quiet and
studious as a child, and remained so until I entered an area of controversial
physics, at age 50. I remain studious,
but am not by any means so quiet! I
have acquired a mission, to tell the world the hard facts about the “EPR”
experiments that are being reported as showing that the world we live in obeys
weird quantum laws: “entangled” particles are supposed to be able to influence
each other instantaneously however far apart they are. The experiments have been
misinterpreted. The theory is crazy,
but there is no sign that the universe is.
To return
to my story, the 1939-45 war meant the our family at first had no permanent
home, with my father, an air-line pilot, moving from one RAF base to another
and then, for a year or more, out to Baghdad.
We lived in Cairo for some time, and my elder sister and I were sent to
a French-speaking school. I do not
remember having managed to learn any French (later I did learn some, enabling
me to read Alain Aspect’s PhD thesis, a landmark in my self-appointed
challenge). I became exceedingly
introverted, too shy to ask questions.
I learned to work things out for myself.
Back in
England, I had a very conventional education, always gaining high grades at
school, loved by the teachers, musical, a nature lover, but with few
friends. I won a scholarship to
Cambridge to read mathematics, but here was not so successful. I could no longer score 90% in tests! I was up against boys for the first time in
my life, and they had been taught more than me. Still, I persevered and later (much later, in 1992 or so)
discovered that my Director of Studies had thought highly of me, saying that
she considered me capable of original thought.
I gained a 2-1, and enough of an introduction to the ideas of
mathematical physics to know that there was something odd going on. Neither relativity nor quantum theory seemed
reasonable.
I shall
pass swiftly over my uninspiring career.
I tried teaching, then I worked as a “systems analyst”, producing a
simulation program of the air traffic control system around Hong Kong
airport. Then I decided to aim for a
job in the country, and went to Reading University to gain the qualifications
(an MSc in Biometry) for a post as statistician at East Malling Research
Station, where they do research on horticultural crops. I learned their version of “experimental
method”, in which human bias was kept under strict control: the statisticians
laid down the rules, aiming to ensure that the published results were
valid. The local fruit-growers relied
on them in their commercial decisions.
Marriage,
at age 32, marked the end of my academic career. I had two children, then moved to Wales, where my father had
retired to a small farm. My husband is
not academic, and reckons to be able to turn his hand to most things, but Wales
proved a difficult place to find employment.
We are not Welsh, and have not learned the language. We tried running a small transport business,
but this was a failure. In 1990 we lost
our home and had to move into rented accommodation. We were very lucky in this – we are still here, in a very pleasant
house with a garden of which we are quite proud.
I took a
training course in Information Technology and enjoyed it, then went to
University of Wales, Aberystwyth, to do an MSc in Computer Science. I enjoyed this, too, but it showed no sign
of leading to a job. I did not fit in,
did not speak Welsh. My supervisor,
Horst Holstein, had some books on physics.
He lent me Hendrik Lorentz’ “Problems of Modern Physics”, published
1927. I immersed myself in a world that
was partly the “neural nets” of my MSc project and partly the world of
fundamental physics – not the
mathematical version of it this time, though, but the intuitive one. I wanted to understand what magnetism really
was, what light really was, how the aether worked – I was sure Lorentz was right and there was an aether,
but I doubted whether it was the absolute, static, one that he had in mind.
Round about
this time, I came across a reference I’d been looking for. About a year earlier I had heard for the
first time of the EPR experiments that were supposed to demonstrate quantum
action-at-a-distance. I had been amazed,
as I had vaguely assumed that quantum theory would have died out by now as it
seemed so blatantly inadequate. To me,
a statistical theory cannot make sense without a more detailed one existing, in
principle at least, to describe the entities that are being analysed. I knew in my bones that I would be able to
find a more rational explanation for whatever it was those experiments had
produced. Anyway, towards the end of 1993
I came across in a New Scientist newsletter a reference to Alain Aspect’s papers
in Physical Review Letters. My ticket
for Aberystwyth University Library had just lapsed, but there was nothing to
stop me going and looking at the papers.
I read one. I could almost
understand it. I knew that this was
within my grasp, as this was clearly not the incontrovertible evidence that one
would reasonably have hoped for! How on
earth had it happened that the world had been asked to accept “nonlocality” on
such flimsy evidence?
From this
point on there was no turning back. I
have devoted my life to finding out how the various “quantum entanglement”
experiments worked and to trying to publicise my findings. As soon as I had worked out my first idea (I
had rediscovered the “detection loophole” after just a few days of thought) I
wrote a short report on it, took it to my own head of section and to the
Physics Department, and asked if I could please continue to use the library and
the University computer so as to continue my investigations. The Physics Department were noncommittal,
but the Computer Science head, Frank Bott, supported me. He is still doing so.
For the
next few months I studied the experiments, following the chains of references,
sometimes breaking off to find out the relevant physics from text books. It was very exciting. It did not take long to understand the
experiments (other “realists” had been there before me), but the challenge was
to understand the community! What had
gone wrong? How could they fail to see
what I could see? How could they ignore
the realist papers? I wrote up my own
simple explanation, using analogy and minimal mathematics so that I did not see
how any reader could fail to understand it.
I started trying to tell the world.
My first
opportunity was Roger Penrose, who had the misfortune to be presenting a set of
three public lectures in Aberystwyth, March 1994. I took my papers round to his hotel, then arranged to meet him in
the Physics Department lounge for coffee.
Poor man, he had expected a quiet little holiday, and instead had to
listen to a madwoman! I had,
unfortunately, just had a “revelation” about the nature of gravity, and poured
all this out instead of concentrating on the solid facts of those experiments
of Alain Aspect’s!
He escaped,
and did not reply to my letters. I
looked elsewhere, to the people who had written the papers and books I was now
reading, and wrote to a few of them.
Quite a number of them thought my first paper was good, and I began to
meet people, starting with a trip to Manchester to see Trevor Marshall, who had
written an important paper with Emilio Santos and Franco Selleri in 1983. A few months later I gave my first talk, a
seminar at the University of Bari, Italy, invited there by my good friend
Selleri. That same summer (1995) I
visited Santos in Santander, and in the autumn spoke at a conference in Durham,
at the invitation of another good friend, Euan Squires, sadly now
deceased. I have now given similar
talks on about 6 occasions, but mostly I communicate with the world through
internet discussions and by putting papers in the Los Alamos quantum physics
archive. I have papers published in
several books and one in Foundations of Physics Letters, but my attempts at
storming the establishment journals – Physical Review Letters and Physical
Review A – have met with failure.
Not
outright failure, though! There has
been interesting correspondence – see my article
in “Accountability in Research”.
It is
recognised that I am right! The
attitude of the people in the field is epitomised by that of Abner Shimony, to
whom I have recently gained an introduction.
He made important contributions to the subject, co-authoring a paper on
a modified Bell inequality in 1969 and a comprehensive report in 1978. He is aware of the loopholes, and hence
knows that the existing experiments can be explained by “local realist”
models, but he seems to believe that the quantum theory explanation is in fact
the correct one and is expecting future experiments to be conclusive.
Sorry, this
was supposed to be about myself but my life and work are not
separable! I shall return briefly to
that painful matter of earning a living.
As I said, I do not fit in. I
have not found employment as such, but a couple of years ago we inherited a
little money and used it to buy a Franchise.
My husband now supplies sweets to about 150 shops scattered over the
South-West corner of Wales, and I assist with the paperwork. I intend to write books – I feel compelled
to – but whether or not I can do this at a profit is an open question. The sweet business is not yet profitable, so
we are still dependent on state benefits.
Other
biographical details: we have two boisterous dogs, two cats, a very tame Sun
Conure (at present helping me on the keyboard!) and, outside, a whole aviary of
other birds. My father, now aged 86,
has recently published the history of IFALPA, the airline pilots’ association
that he helped to create, and two days ago launched his autobiography. My mother celebrated the event by giving
what she hopes will be her last party – she is not as strong as she used to
be. The children have now (almost) left
home, having survived the deprivations of their early years remarkably well. My daughter has started a career in a
medical laboratory in Sheffield, while my son is doing a Computer Science
degree at Brighton. I wonder if some
day he might join me in physics, re-establishing the notion of the aether,
challenging the very “facts” of physics!
We think we know the law of gravity, we think we know roughly how much
the planets weigh, we think we know what the sun is made of, how it produces
its energy, but do we? Do we yet know anything?