Yes, I understand that. Thanks.

Thank you for your explanations. I will chew on it.

hear hear

Good choice. But the difference between jazz and a Beethoven symphony might well be compared to my knowledge of math and yours. Also, you might enjoy the Chicago style of jazz with it's same harmonies and progressions but bigger sound. Duke Ellington comes to mind.

If I were cleverer, that would have been my answer too. In an argument with a person who, using the quantum world as an excuse, said there was no such thing as "reality" I said "Fine, but reality is inexorable. Avoid it, and it will destroy you."

Explanations that you disagree with, though I often do agree with you, are not trolling.

A photon is a subatomic 'particle' with energy but no mass. The wave attributes and particle attributes in different circumstances have energy, but I wouldn't say they are '"just energy". They have momentum, too, but what else is not known. We know them by the principles we have so far like Maxwell's equations, quantum electrodynamics, and their consequences -- mathematically and in reality.

The right path includes better methods of forming abstract concepts and principles, and getting rid of the influence of philosophy since Kant. But it's a very hard problem even with that.

The best you could do is to try to understand some of the experiments that show how different the quantum world is.

Bohr was the leader of the group that helped put physics on the wrong path and had enormous influence. But his early formula for discrete energy levels of the atom was at a time when classical physics was hoped to apply with some modifications. He conceived of classical orbits with quantum assumptions without explanation other than he knew he had to get discrete energy levels. The construction only got the spectrum right for the simple Hydrogen atom. It was an early clever and simple attempt grasping for some kind of breakthrough, which caused some excitement during the quandry, but the attempt to use a fudged classical mechanics, with or without explanation, was doomed. The worst of his influence was yet to come.

Heisenberg was more successful in his more generalized attempts to find a principle for the spectrum. Through tedious algebraic calculations he came up with what others converted to simpler matrix equations which turned out later to be the discrete basis equivalent of the later independently formulated Schrodinger equation with the same spectrum. It was a legitimate accomplishment, but lacked conceptual explanation, even in the form of Bohr's modified classical orbit approach. Attempts like deBroglie to formulate sensible explanations failed, and then they turned to the gibberish of the Copenhagen interpretation making things perpetually worse than a lack of understanding. That was related to the paraphrase above, but it sure wasn't what made doors open automatically and circuits smaller.

Popularized accounts trying to simplify, even when written by prominent physicists, leave a lot to be desired for accuracy of meaning. You can realize that without anyone expecting more of you, there is only so much you have time to learn (or want to in your priorities). When they get to "parallel universes" and the like posing as legitimate physical theories, the "advanced physicists" don't understand it either. They understand the mathematical manipulations they use to rationalize it, but that's it.

As for the modern scherzo harmonies, I prefer the simpler harmonies of New Orleans jazz improvization and know what to stay away from :-)

A photon or EM wave is just energy.

Right so don't use Euclidean when you build a house and ignore Newtonian mechanics when you build a car and ignore Maxwell when you build a radio. Knowledge is about understanding the world we live in, but perfect knowledge is the about the world of sophistry.

BS

I haven't seen energy treated explicitly as an independent entity as in an object (except in the long gone 19th century 'energy physics' claiming everything is made of energy as the metaphysical constituents.) Energy is an abstraction involving action and attributes. As an abstract concept you refer to "the energy" which is implicitly or explicitly the energy of something or some collection of somethings in a system. It is regarded as an entity epistemologically in that context, but is not a metaphysical entity. See the section 'what is an entity' in the appendix on the workshops in Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. That is not to say that people don't improperly reify abstractions; they do.

But there is no question that mass can be converted to energy: it means there is less mass and more energy at the end of some process than at the beginning in accordance with a known equivalence. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki witnessed it directly. The internal mechanism, beyond the production and annihilation of elementary 'particles' along with changes in atomic structure, is not known, which might have been what the professor did not explain to your satisfaction. Nuclear explosions are not the only examples.

You haven't given logical arguments based on scientists. You have explicitly tried to reduce the nature of science to faith and religion. Manipulating words through alternate usage found in a dictionary does not address the concepts employed here and is not logical. It's more like medieval scholastics pretending to reason. Names are for identification. It is not 'name calling' that you object to, but your arguments being identified for what they are.

I have no troll-like behaviour.

Giving that background is helpful and confirms my initial impression. Your reaction as a physics major was not uncommon. You weren't helped by the prevalence of positivist philosophy (and "operationism") that pervaded physics and undermined concepts of physics and their explanation. I remember once being stunned by a very good professor in a very good graduate school (and also previously by another very practical engineer educated in the same era as the professor) insisting that the meaning of charge and electron are only what you read on an ammeter.

Much of what else you read in popularized accounts is hype and metaphor, and is not a good source to try to understand anything.

I didn't say that subatomic particles are not "material" in the philosophical sense, or in any way mystical. They are not "matter"; they are not materialS as we commonly know different substances as matter consisting of atomic building blocks in different configurations leading to different perceivable or directly measurable macroscopic properties. They are physical, but have fundamentally different attributes and do not follow the laws of classical physics. That is simply a brute fact determined by countless experiments and to be accepted for what it is.

How you determine what they are, unlike so much of elementary classical physics, can only be determined by inference and indirect measurements indicating their behavior and attributes. A thing is the totality of its attributes, not an identityless pin cushion with attributes stuck to it. All you know about anything is through those attributes you know about.

You can't "visualize" them either, it can only be understood through abstractions based on abstractions (in the sense of Ayn Rand's epistemology). The mental concretes are the words under which concepts are integrated, not visual images. This is not at all the same as the positivist approach of equating the meaning of a concept of physics with how it is measured (then followed by rampant speculation into fantasies) which is why we got such poor explanations in physics classes.

(Also the opposite of physical is not mystical; consciousness is an objective part of the universe, inherent in some living beings, but is not physical.)

Bohm gave one of the better explanations of special relativity, including the history of Lorentz's attempt to explain an actual physical contraction in terms of electric fields (which didn't work in the end). You didn't find the explanation you wanted because there is none. The primary fact that has not been further investigated and explained is the speed of light being the same in any reference frame, and what that means for a "speed", and why. That is the real physics of the theory in that one fact. Given that, special relativity is almost entirely the mathematics of the kinematics for what is observed from and for different moving reference frames. A lot of the confusion arises from the fact that Einstein at the time (but not later) was heavily influenced by Mach's positivism, so what things are were confused with measurement only, obfuscating the difference between an apparent contraction and a real one (which in Einstein's theory does not occur). Read it again from that perspective and you will see better what they were doing and how it fits together.

But your approach of not accepting what you don't understand is the correct one. If something in quantum mechanics doesn't make sense, then the proper approach is to say you don't understand it and try then or later to understand better the experiments on which it is based so see if the concepts are correct, rather than treating it as dogma to accept and then talk yourself into.

Dare I ask what is the right path?
From what I can tell, for every solution, five more problems appear. I am very, very, far from being a physicist but I started my quantum "hobby" because I couldn't feel comfortable living in the 21st century without knowing something about it. I had the same feeling 50 years ago when I felt that living in the 20th century, I should know how to fly a plane. I learned, I solo'd but that didn't make me a pilot.

I read the books by respected physicists who try to reveal the quantum world to musicians and shopkeepers. When the math is illustrated along with the explanations I fully understand it. But, If I were called upon to create an expression in equation form to back up what I've learned, all I would be able to do would be to write out the work already supplied to me. You cannot expect more of me, any more that I would expect you to write a scherzo using modern harmony at least four modulations. I am aware of the conflicting theories of everything from parallel universes too string theory, to chaos. But of course, I cannot appreciate it on the same level as an advanced physicist.

What bothered me about this professor and what continues to bother me in popular or academic literature is treating energy as if it is some independent entity.

Carol by any other name would sound the same.

Bohr's model of the atom was flawed. He was part of the group that put physics on the wrong path.

I would like to give you a point, but your troll like behavior in other areas stops me.

mass is converted to energy photons all the time. It has been well explained and is used in PET scans and other positron electron devices. Why this occurs might be a very interesting question, but that it occurs is not.