Nothing is, in the strictest sense, impossible. Science can't tell you what's possible or impossible; it can only tell you how the smart money would bet.
The physicists are content with the model they've got, and it may be another 400 or 500 years before someone decides to try to reinvent the wheel.
Highly un-historical baloney.
By then, there will be so many bells and whistles on the old theory that any new idea will be met with an argument like "Well, what about that bell? Where's that bell in your model?" In fact, we are already at that point, as evidenced by your post. Comparing a newborn baby to an adult is a hard comparison.
Yea, well, the fact is, we don't topple major scientific paradigms on the whim of disgruntled cranks who can't put anything any more technical on the table than their dispeptic cynicism.
I have difficulty understanding, though, how a scientist could buy into the notion of stochastic processes like that.
You're not the first, and you won't be the last. Nonetheless, it is a fundamental assumption of quantum physics.
What does it imply? It implies that certain physical values are determined randomly--no causal factor, no reason. That seems to undermine the very idea of mechanics. Mechanics implies causation.
Causation is not a tangible physical reality, it is a human construct of convenience, and even if it were a physical law, it ain't obvious how stochastic events violate it.
It also seems contrary to the conservation of energy principle.
Not particularly.
Something pops out of nowhere, for no reason. It seems supenatural to me.
Maybe it is. Science only digs it's spurs into tangible evidence. An explanation as to why quantum events occur may be permanently outside it's realm of effective concern.
And these random processes don't seem to operate without limit. We don't see them operating on the macro level, for example.
Well, that's a bit of a fine distinction. We've now thrown things as large a buckyballs thru the 2-slit experiment, and still seen them go thru both slits at once. Or are you now claiming that large molecules are just a trick of perspective?
If a leaf falls from a tree, we can explain that by supposing that the chemical bonds became weakened. Since it happens primarily in the autumn, that's pretty good evidence that it's not random. And these stochastic processes operate within confined parameters, and only in areas that we can't come up with another theory to explain.
Yea, we know it's hard to swallow. It countervailed about two centuries of hope that we lived in a clockwork universe that could ultimately be determined by a formal system with just a handful of axioms. Like Euclid's "Geometry", or Newton's "Principia". Sorry about that. There are just too many problems with that model to have any realistic expectation that it will ever be restored to scientific primacy. As comforting as it may seem, it belongs in the museum with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. How do you deal with my original objection: that if the universe is completely deterministic, there can't be a smallest irreducible entity?
I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion, so it's kind of hard to respond. When you think about graininess, though, the fact that the universe is grainy at some level doesn't in any event necessarily mean that there is nothing smaller than that grain. There might be something smaller, but you can't discern it because of the graininess at the larger level.
I don't see why anything I've said is inconsistent with the two slit results. In fact, the two slit experiments are perfectly consistent with the notion that particles are waves in an elastic field. Waves would be spread out, and of course, would go thru both slits. It's the idea that particles are not waves that runs into problems with the two slit experiments.