There exists a classical model of the photon after all

"Chaotic Ball" model, local realism and the Bell test loopholes

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0210150

...any thoughts?

1) Einstein didn't work from intuition, but from a particularly narrow insistence on that the laws of physics be the same for all observers. This informed both SR and GR, and in fact his "intuition", such as it was, led him wildly astray in the run-up to GR. His papers in the 1913-1915 timeframe were all over the map. Furthermore, the final decades of Einstein's life were almost completely sterile in terms of new physics because he let his intuition guide him: he insisted that "god does not play dice" and so on, which turned out to be a hiding to nowhere.

2) Even if Einstein had worked primarily on the basis of intuition (which he didn't) and had been right (which he wasn't when he relied primarily on intuition) it would not in any way absolve us from the duty of taking experimental results far more seriously than theoretical intuitions, because against that one (actually imaginary) triumph of intuition we would have to balance thousands of years of intuitions from very smart people that turned out to be false.

"Things fall toward the center of the Earth and planets move in perfect circles about it" was intuitively obvious to Aristotle. So were a lot of other falsehoods. Galen had a whole raft of intuitions about human physiology that were false. Everyone from Kant to the Positivists believed it was intuitively obvious that detecting a violation of the law of non-contradiction of the kind implied by the experimental violation of Bell's inequalities was impossible. And so on.

So even if we had a single instance of intuition being correct, we would still be crazy to rely on it given its long track record of abject failure. "It just makes sense" are the most dangerous four words you can speak, because they are the terminus of critical thought.

The question I have, though, is this: does this model actually help model phenomena that we can't already model? Quantum gravity is the big spectacular example, but there are many others.

For instance, the Standard Model is very successful at predicting the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. But it is not successful at predicting the same quantity for the muon. There are many other issues with the Standard Model that aren't so high-flung as quantum gravity.

Are classical models like these, if they can be shown to incorporate multiple particles interacting simultaneously, capable of going beyond the Standard Model or merely replicating it?

If there is no reason to believe in collapse, there is no reason to believe that we can only be conscious of our state of entanglement with one component of a wavefunction rather than both.

That is, the Everret interpretation assumes that for some unknown reason we can only be conscious of the classical world, and uses this assumption to "explain" that we are conscious only of the classical world.

Consider a polarizing beam splitter with detectors in either arm. We are only ever conscious of a photon being detected in one arm or the other. But why not both, since the matter of our brain is necessarily entangled with both components of the photon wavefunction?

All Many Worlds does is push the central mystery around, from "Why do photons prepared in the same initial state collapse into different final states?" to "Why aren't we conscious of being entangled with both photon polarization states rather than just one?" It won't do to simply say, "Well, consciousness doesn't work that way." We know it doesn't. The question is, given the otherwise completely continuous physics describing the world, why is the physics of the brain such that it can't generate consciousness of that world?

Decoherence and similar approaches have the same problem, because they assume that for some reason the brain is unable to detect the quantum world without the aid of such classical phenomena as interference patterns in photon detection, but there is simply no warrant for that assumption.

If you restrict your description of the universe to non-collapsing QM you would never guess at the existence of the classical world. Ergo, a brain fully-described by non-collapsing QM is a quantum brain, and there is no particular reason why it shouldn't be in all states at once. That is it not in all states at once is manifestly true, but the question is "Why not?" It won't do to simply assume it, as all these alternative interpretations of QM do.

Getting the brain to be aware of only a single classical world is exactly the same problem as getting a wavefunction to collapse. It has just moved the problem around, not solved it.