Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist

    1.0   Big Foot prints

    Suppose that you find a shiny silver dollar on the street and you see a curved mark on it (Fig. 1). What would
    you conclude with respect to how this line was made? Was it scratched with a knife? Did someone make
    the holes with a single bite? Are the marks footprints left by something that rolled over the coin gradually?
Anderson's footprints

Fig. 1   Wafer with a curved line marked on it

    In 1932, Carl Anderson was confronted with this dilemma. Anderson placed a metal wafer in a cloud
    chamber and, when he retrieved it, he discovered a curved line on it. Anderson concluded that the line was
    a geodesic: a trace made by a particle (Fig. 2).

    “ On August 2, 1932, during the course of photographing cosmic-ray tracks produced
        in a vertical Wilson chamber… the tracks shown in Fig. 1 were obtained, which seemed
        to be interpretable only on the basis of the existence in this case of a particle" [1]

    Anderson had to account for the sharp deflection in his report. Since he was just a mathematician,  Ander-
    son got busy calculating the mass and speed necessary to produce such a curve. He fudged with the
    numbers until he got them to match his preconceived notions. Eureka! Anderson realized that he had
    confirmed the existence of the positron, a particle that Dirac had 'predicted' 4 years earlier. This discovery
    garnered him the Noble Prize of Relativity or of Quantum (or something like that) of 1936.

    Anderson's saga was another success story in the history of Quantum, an early milestone in what would be
    an uninterrupted string of 'confirmations'  of particles, the bread and butter of Mathematical Physics.

    Apparently, Anderson arbitrarily and without any evidence opted to say that his trace consists of a series of
    locations of ONE particle. But since the background is a physical medium and not empty space, we are left
    with two possibilities: the continuous trough and a series of footprints. Anderson is suggesting that we are
    all staring at a collage: a series of marks imprinted in succession by one entity on a still image. Any way we
    look at it  --  collage, movie, footprints, trough --  we are not looking at a still image. Anderson and his
    successors are pointing to a photograph and telling us that we are staring at a series of frames comprising
    a movie. He is not talking about a geometric figure. He is talking about tracks or a groove left by ONE
    particle.


    4.0   The source of the problem: the 'particle' gas chamber

    The reason Anderson felt comfortable with his conclusion can be traced to Wilson's  cloud chamber, the
    tool that the mechanics have used for decades to win Nobel Prizes.  Wilson's cloud chamber (and later
    Glaser's  bubble chamber) is supposed to work via particles that ionize more particles:

    "In its most basic form, a cloud chamber is a sealed environment containing
      a supercooled, supersaturated water vapour. When an alpha particle or beta
      particle interacts with the mixture, it ionises it. The resulting ions act as
      condensation nuclei, around which a mist will form (because the mixture is
      on the point of condensation). The high energies of alpha and beta particles
      mean that a trail is left, due to many ions being produced along the path of
      the charged particle." [2]

    The bubble chamber works in a similar way:

    " A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid
       used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. The charged
       particle deposits sufficient energy in the liquid that it begins to boil along its
       path, forming a string of bubbles. Bubble chambers are similar to cloud
       chambers in application and basic principle." [3]

    These explanations already make at least three a priori assumptions that seal the fate of the physical
    interpretations the mathematicians offer:

    1.       the entire Universe consists of particles

    2.       the atom looks like Bohr's thoroughly debunked planetary model (electron
    orbiting a nucleus)

    3.       ionization consists of a debunked Bohr atom which has lost a marble

    So it is not surprising that the mechanics end up concluding that they are staring at the trace of a particle.
    They believe they are 'proving' particle tracks through experiment when the alleged particle is actually an
    assumption from the start. The mathematicians who 'accelerate particles' at places like SLAC and CERN
    never proposed any alternative. Ergo, Anderson's positron was already a particle before he started his
    experiment. The infamous 'positron' was a foregone conclusion. If the assumption is wrong, Anderson has
    to return his gold medal.

    It is to note that Anderson's fateful 'discovery' is an important milestone in the history of Quantum
    Mechanics. Spurred by his easily won Nobel, dozens of wannabes rushed to see if they could get one too.
    Anderson's prize initiated a massive gold rush that hasn't abated till today. It set off an incessant series of
    experiments in which researchers 'discovered' more and more particles in similar ways. A particle
    mathematician saw a trace, gave it a Greek letter, and demanded that his peers recognize his immense
    contribution to science. The trickle of imagined and tentative particles became a deluge. So many particles
    were ‘predicted’ and then predictably ‘discovered’ that a suspicious Oppenheimer exclaimed facetiously
    that “the Nobel Prize in physics shall go to the physicist who does NOT discover a new particle that year.”   
    A skeptical Fermi added sarcastically that “if I had known there would be so many particles, I would have
    become a botanist rather than a physicist.”

    Today the Standard Model lists over 200 particles. A system that was supposed to be simple just got more
    and more complicated. The fundamental particle that underlay all matter is ever farther from reach, and
    Ockham’s Razor  has today become an anachronistic tradition.


    5.0   The rope hypothesis

    So what is the alternative to Anderson's 'trace'?

    One possibility that needs to be considered is the rope. Like the little girl said, the wafer could have just
    been whacked by a rope coming from the side (Fig. 5). Electromagnetism doesn't consist of particles. An
    electromagnetic 'wave' consists of two twined threads. (Here you can visualize how threads swing around
    a magnet to get a rough idea of how a rope can produce this effect.)

    If Anderson's suppositron did not jump up and down, perhaps it made 'continuous' contact with the metal
    throughout its trip, increasingly piling up more and more metal in front of itself as it ripped through the
    surface! Under this scenario, Anderson would be compelled to factor the increasing inertia the particle felt
    as it pushed against more and more matter, and to calculate the amount of metal that was accumulated in
    front of it until the particle finally skipped over the ditch to win its freedom. Or perhaps Anderson should
    check the wafer again! Maybe his particle is still there at the end of the mound!

    Fig. 2   Anderson's Suppositron

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    2.0   Review of Anderson's 'discovery'

    Let's review Anderson's conclusions just to make sure he crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

    Let's assume you paint a wall on the outside of your house and you see Dennis the Menace, the
    neighborhood brat, bouncing his little ball against the wall next door. You can already imagine what pranks
    are running through this evil boy's mind because he has done many of them before. You absolutely hate
    this kid. You have built a great animosity towards him. You have it in your mind that you're going to run him
    over with your car some day.

    You finish painting your wall and go inside for a lemonade. You can still hear the echo of Dennis' ball
    bouncing against the wall outside. Sometimes it stops. Then, it begins again. No problem. You are not going
    to let it trouble you. You finish your break, go outside, take a good look at your masterpiece, and discover a
    long streak like the one in Fig. 1 on it.

    That's it! You've had enough! You've held it back for too many years! There's just too much pain! Too many
    memories! Not enough patience! No more Mr. Nice Guy! Without a word, you go inside, grab your shotgun,
    load it, go outside, look for Dennis, point, and a second later the frantic cries for help go deaf. Justice has
    finally been served.

    Dennis' mom comes out crying and yelling that you killed her little baby. You tell her that he deserved it.

    "Why," she asks.

    "Look at what he did to my wall," you answer angrily. "He waited until I turned my back, and marked all
    these holes on it with his ball. He just couldn't resist the temptation, could he?"

    A trembling little girl appears timidly from behind you. She is your daughter. She is holding a rope in her
    hand. She apologizes in a sweet little voice and says "I'm sorry daddy. It was me. I was skipping my rope
    near the wall. I got too close and involuntarily gave it a whack. Please don't shoot me!"

    This heartwarming story entertains the possibility that Anderson may have rushed just a little too fast to get
    his noble medal. Anderson and his team were so eager to believe that the mark on the wafer was made by a
    particle (to confirm once again their beloved Quantum Mechanics) that he never stopped to consider other
    hypotheses. He summarily concluded that he was staring at a trace made by a particle.


    3.0   So why isn't Anderson's positron a particle?

    Anderson's corpuscular version of what he saw raises troubling questions. Did the particle make a
    continuous groove as it slid on the surface of the wafer (Fig. 2) or did it bounce up and down like a
    kangaroo, making discrete pock marks in the sand (Fig. 3)? Is the alleged trace continuous or segmented?
    Are we staring at a ditch, at Big Foot's footprints, or at a series of oranges laid side by side  (Fig. 4)? Are we
    staring at a photograph, at a collage, or at a movie? What is it that we are looking at?

Fig. 4   There are lines and there are lines



    Fig. 3   Jumpin' Jehosaphat! A jumpin' bean!
Fellas! I know that I'm not
an expert. But I think
there is something you
should know.

Fig. 5   Whacking a mechanic

How the rope generates a 'positron trace'
Anderson supposed that he was
staring at the trace made by a
particle. He concluded that he had
discovered a particle 'predicted' by
Dirac four years earlier and known
today as the positron. His friends
decided to give him a Nobel Prize in
Quantum for this great discovery.
If Anderson's suppositron ball jumped up and down to create
a series of pock marks, we have a different ball game. It
would mean that the motion of the particle was in a direction
perpendicular to the wafer. This opens up a nasty can of
worms that no one can close. Quantum Mechanics holds
that a particle behaves as a wave when it is not in contact
with matter. This means that Anderson's stupid ball went
from particle to wave and back as it hopped around to
produce each footprint. This would require that he calculate
and account for the time the particle spent when not in
contact with the wafer. Perhaps his corpuscle travels a little
faster than what he calculated.
The mathematicians are idiots by nature. They call everything a line. To them a geodesic is a line, a
distance is a line, a trace is a line, a segment is a line, a string is a line, and an infinite line is a line. A
mathematician is unconcerned about Physics or grammar, so he doesn't care about qualitative
aspects of the things he stares at or defines. Therefore, he never found a need to discriminate among
the different types of lines.

Which one of these is Anderson's famous 'suppositron'?