The world 's greatest mystery is not an Agatha Christie story. It is the fact that science's most accurate and most unequivocally valid theory, quantum mechanics, is based on data which are logically impossible, the wave-particle paradox. A particle is a tiny piece of solid matter. A wave is the rhythmical slouching back-and-forth of multitudes of particles. Obviously, nothing can be both. But there are abundant data which appear to show fundamental matter is both. No one is content with this logical absurdity, so some of history's most brilliant scientists have tried to find or invent a rational explanation. They have provided more than a dozen different guesses, but none has won general acceptance. What is worse, all involve unbelievable claims or absurdities of their own. For example, the most widely accepted explanation says the universe doesn't really exist until someone looks at it. But if nothing exists, then who could look?! However, what many persons find most objectionable about these many hypothetical explanations (i.e., guesses) is their implication that physical reality is a subjective, mystical, magical process.
Einstein categorically rejected such mysticism. He thought a more fundamental theory would provide a scientific explanation. But his efforts to produce such a theory were a failure. The present book presents an opposite approach. It assumes quantum mechanics is scientifically complete, so it does not address the quantum mystery as a scientific problem. Rather, its approach is based on another Einsteinian suggestion. He said he was confident the explanation, when found, would be so simple that when stripped of the mathematics in which all physical theories are stated, it could be understood by a child. Following this suggestion the idea presented in the present book involves neither the technicalities nor math of quantum science. Rather it suggests a hidden mechanical procedure so elementary a child can understand it. Not only can this hidden process completely and logically explain the wave-particle paradox, it can also explain many other aspects of the quantum mystery. For example, it can explain the recently empirically proven but mind boggling nonlocality phenomenon (whereby a cause at one location has an effect elsewhere).
Were this all the model can explain it would be worthy of serious consideration. But it has a completely unintended additional benefit. The simple mentally picturable mechanical model can also explain the two puzzling phenomena of special relativity, completely unrelated phenomena. This result was unsought and unintended. Before the model was developed such an outcome would have been considered impossible. Therefore, this unexpected achievement strongly supports the model's believability.
Because this explanation is based on a process which is hidden, it can not be scientifically verified. Therefore, in no way whatsoever does it change the science of quantum mechanics. It only offers a hypothetical picture of the fundamental process of physical reality which is objective, completely logically consistent and intuitively understandable. For those willing to accept it, it offers a way to make sense of quantum reality.
