The wisdom of the masses has (barely) prevailed!

Indeed the Gluon, the force carrier of quantum chromodynamics, was discovered at the Positron Elektron Ring Anlage PETRA in Hamburg in 1979.

What was seen concretely was a three jet event. The light particles involved in strong interactions are never seen in isolation because when you try separating them, for instance two quarks, the binding energy simply produces more in-between particles. For this reason, when you make two quarks, what you see in the detector are two showers called jets of many particles produced in the subsequent in-between strong interactions after the quark pair is produced and flies away in opposite directions.

If you make quarks all you ever get is an even number of jets. Gluons however are predicted to radiate off quarks like photons would with charged particles, and an extra gluon can thus add a third jet to the two quark jets.

That's precisely what was observed back then at DESY

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@startswithabang

Of course our physical reality exists independent of the observer. The idea that it is otherwise is the original sin of what I call "mystical" Quantum Theory (Niels and Werner, I am looking at you!).

The only thing where there is a problem with QM is , when we try to describe it on concepts that were useful in the macro world (and therefore are evolutionary deeply wired into our brains) but are not applicable in the micro world.

There is no wave/particle dualism: That's just us trying to apply inappropriate macroscopic models and coming out with an inconsistent picture.

There is no collapse of the wave function (or state) on measurement: That's just the observer's quantum mechanical state getting entangled with the state of the observed system.

There is not special role of the (conscious) observer. That's all pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that just happened to align with the preferred world view of the original pusher of those ideas.

On of the problematic concepts is that of an object with properties (an idea that is deeply wired into our brains and our languages).

We know there is, for example, a thing like an electron. It's carrying some effect from the electron gun to the detector (or screen) through intervening space and the influences (like magnetic fields) in this space. We know there is a discrete carrier of those effects (charge is carried in discrete units, the detection happens in discrete units). The effect from ray gun to detector(s) seems not to propagate on a straight line. Turns out, the best description is the wave function, how effects arrive at the detector, but also how we can influence the propagation of the effect.

The electron is the carrier of the effect. The discrete thing transferred between electron source an detectors. But it's like macroscopic object. It doesn't "move" like a stone thrown.

And that's all. There is no mystery to QM. The mystery only comes in when people try to apply the wrong language (concepts) to the domain.

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