Let us begin by defining what "objective physical reality" really means at the level of fundamental physics.

Over the course of the 20^th century, a whole bunch of particles have been identified (or "defined"), that have been mainly (but not exclusively) categorized as part of the Standard Model. They can be sorted out into numerous categories : virtual particles, unstable complex particles, unstable elementary particles, stable complex particles, stable elementary particles, and finally, neutrinos.

We can include here virtual photons, which are a mathematical metaphor that Feynman proposed in 1949 in the frame of his new Quantum Electrodynamic, to render easier the mathematical representation of the underlying Coulombian interaction that is always in action between charged particles [1]. This real Coulombian interaction, being dynamic, was much more difficult to represent mathematically with the Hamiltonian method, that was used previously, than by the Lagrangian method proposed by Feynman, which makes use of momentary states, as if frozen in time, and that he proposed to refer to as "virtual photons".

Let us also include here gluons, which also are mathematical metaphors, but this time, of an interaction that is still not understood between the components of nucleons, in the frame of Quantum Chromodynamics.

There are also the various quarks (except quarks up and down), which are virtual particles that were defined in an attempt to balance the equations of Quantum Chromodynamic to allow a precise calculation for the structure of nucleons.

What allows us to clearly distinguish these metaphorical virtual particles from real particles, is the fact that it is impossible to prove their physical existence by having them collide directly with particles the physical existence of which we are absolutely certain, like the electron, for example.

Here we find "particles" such as the various configurations of mesons pi and K, as well as hyperons, which are complex particles still more massive than protons and neutrons, and that are all unstable with life expectancy never exceeding a few fractions of a second.

What is remarkable about these unstable complex particles, that are produced only in high energy accelerators, and as a by-product of cosmic radiation, is that, without exception, the final product of their decay is systematically one or other, or a combination of the only known stable particles, that is, electrons, positrons, protons and photons.

Consequently, these unstable and ephemeral complex particles could all be considered as simple hyper-energetic states of the fundamental stable particles, and that on short notice, all of them eventually revert to these least energy states after having evacuated all of their excess energy. Any further discovery of more unstable ephemeral particles yet more energetic could only confirm this observation.

In this category, we find only particles muon and tau. It is well known that both of these always leave behind a single electron as a solitary by-product of their decay.

In this category, we find the photon, the electron, the positron (which is the antiparticle of the electron), the up quark and finally, the down quark.

These particles are considered "elementary", because absolutely all of the collision experiments that were ever carried out with them reveal that they behave in all circumstances as point particles, that is, that they seem not to be made up of smaller particles.

They are considered stable, because unless they are physically destroyed (that is, affected by a collision in such a way that they cease to exist under the form that they previously had, either by combining with another particle or by converting into energy), they have an unlimited life span.

Something peculiar can be observed about these stable particles. It is the fact that they all have a spin equal to 1/2 (except for the photon), which characterizes all really point-like particles, et that that they all have an electrical charge, positive or negative (except for the photon, once again).

The case of the photon is very special, in the sense that even if it behaves at all times as a point particle, its spin is equal to 1, which is an unmistakable telltale identifying particles made up of two elements, and that it is electrically neutral.

Louis de Broglie brought us however a most promising avenue of solution to solve this problem. Having analyzed the characteristics of photons in light of the verified aspects of the various theories, he drew the conclusion that the only way for a photon to satisfy at the same time Bose-Einstein's statistic and Planck's law, and to perfectly explain the photoelectric effect while obeying Maxwell's equations and conforming to the symmetry property of complementary corpuscles in Dirac's theory, would be for the photon to be made up not of one corpuscle, but of two corpuscles, or half-photons, that would be complementary, like the electron is complementary to the positron ([2], p.277).

This conclusion, coupled with the fact that in conformity with Maxwell's theory, he considered that the magnetic aspect of particles can only be dipolar at all times, and if we hypothesize that particles are full-fledged electromagnetic entities, and would not be singularities in an underlying wave phenomenon, seems to mandate associating charges (possibly unsigned ?) to each half-photon, and consequently to the photon itself, which would still account for its known electrical neutrality.

What is remarkable about stable elementary particles, is that without exception, we can verify their objective physical existence by mutual collisions with any other particles of the same group.

Neutrinos are a very peculiar case in physics. We know since the early 1920's that part of the energy of the neutron seems to completely vanish when it decays into a proton and an electron, meaning that the sum of the energies of the electron and the proton that result from the decay, is less than the total energy of the neutron before it decayed.

Fermi proposed the hypothesis that this unaccounted for energy must be carried away by some kind of new particle that we were as yet unable to physically detect, and that he proposed to name "neutrino".

Let us mention here that particles muon and tau also seem to lose their excess mass in a similar manner, leaving behind an isolated electron as the only detectable end product of their decay, this excess mass apparently disappearing in the same manner as that of the neutron as it decays.

Let us come back now to the stable elementary particles. It must be understood that all of the stable matter in the Universe is made up exclusively of these stable elementary particles, which, by themselves, are all that is required to describe the only objective physical reality that exists at the fundamental level. Quarks up and down are associated in groups of 3 to form the nucleons (protons and neutrons), that is, 2 up quarks plus 1 down quark to make up a proton, and 2 down quarks plus 1 up quark to make up a neutron. The various elements of the periodic table are made up of various combinations of nucleons, and electrons settle on the various electronic orbitals to give the measurable volume of the various kinds of atoms.

Given that all unstable particles turn out to be, when all has been considered, only extremely short lived hyper-energetic states of stable particles, from this point on, we will henceforth limit our discussion to only that subset, assuming of course, that all laws that apply to stable particles, also apply to unstable particles.

It was Maxwell who first understood that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, when he concluded that the light that reach us from the stars was caused by the interaction of an electric aspect of the energy acting orthogonally to a magnetic aspect of the energy, and that the plane determined by these two aspects was moving in the vacuum of space at the speed of light in a direction orthogonal to that plane.

Maxwell perceived light as a wave whose surface, or wave-front, propagated in spherical expansion at the speed of light from the point of origin. But from analysis of Wien's experimental results on the black body however, Planck demonstrated mathematically that this "wave" was not continuous as Maxwell thought, but discontinuous at the microscopic level, and that Maxwell's wave was only a crowd effect as perceived at the macroscopic level.

Einstein confirmed this hypothesis in 1905, with his photoelectric experiment. Further confirmations were subsequently provided by Compton and Raman.

Doubt was not allowed anymore. Electromagnetic waves such as Maxwell conceived simply did not exist, because in reality, at the microscopic level, they are made up in an experimentally verifiable manner of innumerable discrete electromagnetic events, that were called photons.

A little later, de Broglie hypothesized that electrons also must have a frequency just like photons and consequently also were electromagnetic in nature, which was then experimentally confirmed by Davisson et Germer.

A further step was then taken, which left no doubt whatsoever as to the closeness of the relationship that united photons and electrons, when Frédéric Joliot and Irène Curie demonstrated experimentally in 1933 that any photon of energy 1.022 MeV or more can de-couple into a pair electron/positron when it is caused to graze the nucleus of a heavy atom [3].

On the other hand, we already knew that there existed a direct link between the energy that an electron accumulates as it accelerates between the electrodes of a Coolidge tube, and that which photons are made of, because after an electron has left the cathode, and has accelerated through the vacuum of the tube, a photon is emitted in the x-ray frequencies at the very moment when the electron brutally slows down as it is momentarily captured by an atom of the anode. We know though experimental verification that the energy of that photon is exactly equal to the quantity of motion that the electron was animated with at the moment of its capture, just prior to its slowing down.

Consequently, we know since the 1930's that it is possible to convert the quantities of motion that accumulate through acceleration of electrons to photons, and to convert photons of energy 1.022 MeV or more to pairs of electron/positron.

In the set of stable elementary particles, only quarks up and down have not yet been associated by such a direct link to fundamental energy (quantities of motion accumulated through acceleration) because no attempts were ever done to verify such a possible link since their existence has been experimentally ascertained in 1968 at the SLAC linear accelerator. One can of course wonder why, considering that the comprehension of that last missing causality link could possibly already have given us access to that source of potentially unlimited energy.

With this link, we would finally have mastered the complete sequence of fundamental electromagnetic mechanics of particles.

So, the following question of course comes to mind:

To understand why, we must go back to the end of the 1920's, right after Quantum Mechanics was formulated, combining Schrödinger's equation and a statistical method based on Heinsenberg's uncertainty principle. This principle was pivotal in the general giving up of any causal research that ensued, because its use makes it impossible to simultaneously calculate the precise localisation in space and the relative speed of a particle. Through this method, either one or the other could be computed, but never both at the same time, which makes it impossible to calculate the least action trajectory of electrons, contrary to classical mechanics, which allows it to a degree of approximation sufficient to be useful.

By combining this principle to the paradoxical notion wave-particle (two contradictory notions, as we have seen, since an electromagnetic wave would mandatorily spread in spherical expansion from its point of origin, while an electromagnetic particle mandatorily remains localized at all times), which complicated the picture still more, Heisenberg drew the conclusion that even if an electron can be considered to exist as a localized particle when it is individually detected, it can move only as a diffuse wave packet at any other time, the sum of the energies associated to each wave of the packet making up the total energy of the electron.

This conclusion was in total contradiction with simple common sense, which intuitively reveals that in reality, if a precise quantity of energy is emitted as a localized event, it is totally contrary to common sense that it would not follow at all times its least action trajectory until it is intercepted.

But Heisenberg, immediately approved by Bohr, now proposed as a fundamental dogma to justify the inability of the wave-function and of the statistical method of Quantum Mechanics to compute least action trajectories of particles, that a discrete quantum of energy, that is, the electron, ceases to be discrete between its point of origin and its point of detection, as if the underlying physical reality, whatever it happens to be, changed as if by magic to conform to a statistical method invented by man!

In other words, Heisenberg and Bohr simply decreed that the least action trajectories of particles did not exist, for the simple reason that the calculation method that they favoured, and whose object was the determination of the stationary states of electrons in atoms, was incapable of calculating.

The acceptance of such a premise established Quantum Mechanics as the very foundation of reality, branding as suspect any further attempt to explore a physical reality that could be seen as underlying Quantum Mechanics.

Many prominent physicists protested forcefully, the most notorious of which being Einstein, de Broglie, Planck, and Shrödinger, because they felt here a potential hindrance to further research to comprehend the underlying physical reality more deeply, but nothing could revert the trend. The 1927 Solvay congress confirmed the apparently final triumph of Heisenberg's interpretation, and the history of physics up to now seems to confirm that the worries of the causalists were well founded, since no research whatsoever has been carried out since regarding the nature of the physical reality that underlies Quantum Mechanics and all other theories that have been formulated by man.

The debate raged on until the mid 1950's between the causalist physicists already named, and the promoters of the philosophy of the Copenhagen school of thought, Heisenberg, Bohr and many others ([4]), to end suddenly when the most famous defender of causality, Albert Einstein, passed away in 1955, with the complete victory of the Copenhagen-Göttingen interpretation (Cities where resided Bohr and Heisenberg, and that gave its name to that school of thought). The subsequent persistent efforts of de Broglie, Bohm, Vigier, and others, to bring their peers to reason were just as vain as those of Einstein.

Until the end of his life, de Broglie fought this drift: "The energy and quantity of motion of a particle are quantities that are linked to the concept of a localized object that moves in space along a trajectory" ([2], p.13).

Besides the already mentioned Quantum Electrodynanics proposed by Feynman in 1949, the only important theory that was put forward by the promoters of the school of thought of Copenhagen, the only players in the field for the past 50 years, was Quantum Chromodynamics towards the end of the 1970's, which was meant to describe the internal structure of protons and neutrons, and which, adopting the trend set by Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics, makes use of virtual particles to represent the interactions, to this day still not understood, that are in action between the constituting quarks up and down that were discovered in the 1960's.

It must be made clear here, that even after 30 years of existence, no one has been able to formulate the equations of that theory with sufficient precision to correctly describe a nucleon ([5]), which was its stated justification when it was proposed. But this has not prevented its being flaunted in physics courses as the only possible theory that can describe nucleons.

These two theories, QED and QCD, played a major role in the underestimation, over the course of the past half century, of the importance of Coulombian interaction at the fundamental level, because they generalized the perception that pseudo-quantized virtual entities could physically represent the as of yet still only partly understood Coulombian potential, which is progressively induced between real particles during collision and deflection events involving those particles.

Also, the general acceptance in fundamental physics of the static Lagrangian method instead of the dynamic Hamiltonian method, at Feynman's suggestion, was the direct cause of the complete loss of interest for the fact that collisions and deflection events between particles are precise temporal sequences of events. These collisions and deflection events, not being physically instantaneous, there are serious reasons to question Feynman's opinion when he declared in 1949, and I quote:

"In many problems, for example, the close collisions of particles, we are not interested in the precise temporal sequence of events. It is of no interest to be able to say how the situation would look at each instant of time during a collision and how it progresses from instant to instant." ([1], p.771).

By constantly mentally juggling with this mix of virtual and real particles, the fine conceptual line that must be drawn between the two types has become more and more blurred in the mind of an ever increasing number of physicists, particularly among the staunchest supporters of the Copenhagen school of thought. To such an extent that many now believe in the physical existence of many of these metaphorical virtual particles, like the top quark, for example, despite the obvious impossibility to cause such a mathematical concept to collide with a real particle, like the electron or the positron.

The situation has become particularly worrisome since these irrational notions have begun to be taught to the upcoming generation of physics students, without them being sufficiently being informed to clearly bear judgement on the matter.

So little consideration has come to be recognized to causalists' opinions at the international level that despite his immense stature as the last remaining major architect of modern physics, de Broglie's last book was not even translated to English ([2]). All traces of the ideas of causalist physicists have now completely disappeared world-wide from physics teaching programs.

The contempt towards these major physicists of the past has become such that I recently read on a Usenet physics forum, the intervention of a physicist, pupil of Wheeler, asserting quite seriously that de Broglie probably received his Nobel Prize for political reasons! One can wonder, can't we, about the reasons why such an important player as Louis de Broglie, the finest theoretician on electromagnetism of the 20^th century, is the object of such a level of contempt on the part of contemporary physicist!

For the past 50 years, all physicists who even hinted that they tended to lean towards causalist ideas have been considered by their peers as "men who could not follow the trend of the ideas of their time" as already mentioned by de Broglie in 1955, in the Preface of his book "Nouvelles perspectives en microphysique", speaking of the opinion that the supporters of the school of Copenhagen then had of Einstein.

A very insidious problem is also at play, that blurs still more the issue. It is the tendency towards hyperspecialization and compartmentalization of the various disciplines at the university level, that has been on the increase ever since the 1940's.

To such an extent, in fact, that no single physicist, in our day and age, has a general knowledge of every aspects of his own field. All modern reference works have been written by great experts of each sub-speciality, who often only have the most superficial notions of some of the other sub-specialities of their own field.

Over time, as sub-specialities kept being separated, reorganized and eliminated, important informations eventually ceased completely to be referred to in reference works written subsequently, and have thus completely disappeared from the collective consciousness of the physical community, even though they are still available in the humongous mountain of past writings.

A few examples:

1. The important conclusions of Abraham and Kaufmann relative to the distinction that must be made between longitudinal inertia and transversal inertia, key to the calculation of the correct angle of deflexion of the trajectories of photons by gravitational attraction in the frame of classical mechanics ([6]), ([7]), ([11]). No contemporary physicist has ever heard about the total insensitivity of quantities of motion to transversal interaction that was discovered by these major physicist.
2. The awareness that the level of saturation of the hydrogen basin in the only successful explosive fusion experiments that were carried out, by the neutrons produced by the fission detonator during the initial phase of the fusion, no doubt had a role to play in the triggering of the fusion process ([8]). In that precise case, one can understand that the interdiction imposed for decades for reasons of military security, to write explicitly about nuclear fusion in reference manuals could have caused the loss of this information. The book "The Atomic Nucleus" ([9]) is a perfect example in this regard, not even mentioning the terms "fusion" or "hydrogen" in the Index at the end of the volume, and of course, not even discussing hydrogen fusion in any way, shape or form, contrary to Nahmias's book ([8]).

Could this apparent loss be partly responsible for the difficulties met by physicists teams, most probably taught about nuclear physics with such reference manuals, who have been attempting without success for the past 20 years to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion by simply increasing the temperature of the mix?

3. De Broglie's important conclusion regarding the internal structure of the photon, which, in conjunction with Abraham and Kaufmann's discovery, seem to be the very key allowing to build the last missing causality link between the quantities of motion that accumulate through electromagnetic acceleration of particles and the energy that quarks up and down are made up of ([10]).

To acquire a level of general knowledge in physics, in our day and age, that would compare to that mastered by the physicists of the beginning of the 20^th century, an individual would have to read tens of very specialized books, each using a mathematical language adapted to that sub-speciality, which is not really possible within the constraints imposed by a normal academic education.

The state of hyperspecialization of each physicist has caused recent experimental observations, the likes of which threw physics circles into frenzied effervescence at the beginning of the 20^th century, and sent every physicist of the time into an unbridled race to discovery, are taken on today with the deepest of apathy, each physicist being under the impression that "experts" in this new field are taking charge somewhere else , and that they will eventually be informed of the answer, none of them feeling particularly competent to deal with the problem.

The hurdle here is that the too high a degree of specialization of each physicist forces the setting up of pluridisciplinary teams, teams that seem to not always succeed in sufficiently inter-relating their respective bits of expert knowledge to conclude in a satisfactory manner.

We have had a very telling example of this problem over the course of the past 10 years in the case of the acceleration deemed "anomalous" of far spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and 11, for which the equations of General Relativity have been unable to calculate the observed hyperbolic trajectories.

Descartes wrote very judiciously : "Often, there is not as much perfection in the works made up of many pieces, and done by the hand of many masters, than in those on which only one has worked. Consequently, we can see that buildings planned and completed by a single architect, are more beautiful and well ordained than those on which many have tried to patch up, by using old walls that had been constructed for other purposes."