This page provides a summary of what remains as unresolved challenges in the quest to actually make sense of quantum physics, relative to the mechanisms conclusions and specific proposals of the Spinfield Model.
Opportunities
To start out on a positive note, here are some of the known limitations of the Standard Model that represent opportunities for a new framework (see wikipedia for a listing).
• At the most general level, the lack of an existing universal basis representation for the Standard Model indicates the incomplete nature of this framework.
• The widely-discussed and unsolved incompatibility with gravity, including the “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics” (Hobson et al., 2006) in terms of the energy of the Higgs field and the quantum vacuum state.
• The issue of non-locality addressed below represents a double-edged sword that is both a challenge and an opportunity.
• The finding that neutrinos have mass is not consistent with the Standard Model, and represents a significant problem with the otherwise compelling logic of the electroweak framework.
• The need for renormalization is a widely-recognized issue.
• Many of the basic constants are otherwise unexplained inputs to the model. In general, having a more compelling understanding of properties like the generations and apparent fine-tuning issues in various parameters are outstanding issues.
Non-locality
Non-locality and the Bell inequality tests, along with the associated exponential configuration space, represent the primary unresolved challenge at the level of abstract quantum mechanics. Critically, this should be considered a challenge for the Standard Model as well, because the tensor-product configuration space state that is necessary to compute the predictions in these experiments is clearly in conflict with the constraints of special relativity, even if the resulting predictions themselves end up being invariant to this underlying conflict.
Given the fundamentally inexplicable nature of these issues in any current framework, it seems premature to hold up making progress on other fronts on this account. Thus, we can just put this on the stack, and come back to it once more tractable issues have been resolved.
Field-theory vs. classical waves
The Standard Model uses field theory and virtual particles (via Feynman diagrams) to compute many aspects of the theory, whereas the semiclassical approach suggests that at least the force-field waves remain as such, rather than taking on a particle-like status as treated in the field-theory formalism (which, as emphasized throughout, does not actually involve any actual discrete particles).
At least some of the roles of virtual particles in the standard framework are otherwise accounted for by the classical interacting field model, for example a virtual particle is used in the perturbative framework to model the basic interaction between the electron and the electromagnetic field, including the self-interaction effects.
Other effects require extensive sampling of initial configurations to compute expected values of outcomes – this is something that can become computationally expensive in the classical wave model, but does not reflect a fundamental difference in underlying physics.
One critical contribution of virtual particles is in representing the quantum vacuum state, which is teeming with random possibilities. It is possible that the quantum waves end up leaking out and creating a more active vacuum state expectation. The zero point framework shows how various quantum phenomena can potentially be explained in terms of a semiclassical system interacting with a specific form of vacuum state.
As noted above, the energy associated with the zero point field or the vacuum expectation of the Higgs exceeds cosmologically plausible values by many orders of magnitude. But various empirically-validated phenomena depend on its effects as represented in the Standard Model, so this represents a major challenge and opportunity.