Schrödinger's Accountant

The Cat not in the hat :)

This pix has been in BRT many times as it is so outrageously cool as Schrödinger's cat has been a feline of consummate mystery for over a hundred years but is this really the case? It doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Schrödinger's Accountant

Theoretical physics has spent over a century telling us quantum superposition—the idea that a particle can exist in two states at once—is a mystical, almost magical phenomenon. One puts a cat in a box and proceeds to tell you it is both alive and dead at the same time until you open it. 

Pretty wild eh? But countless experiments proved this duality over and over again. Light is both a wave and a particle when looked at from different perspectives but ...

what if the universe isn't a magician? What if it's just an honest bookkeeper?

You're a customer at Starbucks. You're going for a large black coffee. The price, five dollars. You pull out the five and hand it to the barista. To you, it's a PO, a Purchase Order, to pay for the coffee. To Starbucks, the five is an Invoice, the payment for the item purchased. The minute the five is handed across a counter, both the buyer and the seller hold the five in their hands at the same time. For that fraction of a second, the money exists in two states simultaneously: the Purchase Order and the Invoice.

That isn't magic, and it isn't a paradox. It is simply the exchange required to execute a secure transfer of assets. 

Now, let's apply the exact same accounting principle to light.

 

Thomas Young's 1801 Double Slit experiment

Both a wave and a particle but when looked at closely, it's just balancing the ledger. Light, when moving in free space, is a wave. Analog. Think of a violin creating music or look at the above video. 

Seen below are photons, comprised of analog waves, striking a metal plate. At the exact moment of impact, the photons transform into discrete quanta or packets of energy (digital). This transaction allows the plate's electrons to absorb the energy and dislodge from the surface. The higher the frequency of light, aka photons, the higher altitude the electrons attain when dislodged. When the photon is released by the electron at a later time and reenters space, 
it becomes analog yet again, thus balancing the ledger, like an honest bookkeeper.

The emission of electrons from a metal plate caused by light quanta – photons

The universe doesn't deal in paradoxes; it deals in ledgers. And right now, standard academia is still staring at the cat, completely missing how reality, and business, does business  24/7. :)