Does Quantum Theory Need Space-Time? by Felix M Lev

Felix Lev

Alan, so if I understand you correctly, you are saying that the gravitational force is fundamentally anisotropic but seems to become isotropic when we take average values over large structures. The fact that the gravitational force is anisotropic is well-known (e.g. post-Newtonian corrections depend on velocities). Only in the nonrelativistic approximation, when we neglect all powers of (v/c) it is isotropic. The magnetic force is anisotropic since it depends on velocities already in the main approximation, so when v->0, the force goes to zero too.

Alan Lowey

Okay Felix, yes, you understand me correctly with your opening sentence. I wasn't fully aware of the known anisotropic nature of gravity when the concept of Einstein's relativity is applied. I assume that it's just for velocities which approach the speed of light. Am I right in thinking that there's no scientific reason why there *can't possibly* be non-baryonic matter at the centre of the Earth assuming that Einstein's relativity has a fundamental problem? This is what the Higgs-like particle discovery indicates, doesn't it?

Felix Lev

Dear Alan,

My example with post-Newtonian terms was only for illustration. As I note in my essay, in my approach there is no "fundamental" gravity at all; gravity is simply a kinematical effect which takes place only if at least one body is microscopic. So I believe that nothing should be excluded right away. I am not a geologist, so cannot say anything definite about your idea on non-baryonic matter but it is not clear to me how the recent discovery can shed light on this problem.

Vladimir Tamari

Dear Lev

You addressed the reader at one point "if you are still reading this" well I read the entire essay and understood perhaps 20% of the very technical discussion. Nevertheless from everything you said and from the comments above I can see you have swallowed whole the assumptions of 20th. c. physics. I mean you seem to have mastered the methods of SR GR and QM even though they speak such different languages and address different domains. In my essay, naive as it may appear to you, there is an appeal for a concerted effort to find a better, simpler understanding of Nature. I would appreciate it if you read it as well as my Beautiful Universe theory upon which it is based. Yes it is a simplistic approach but I strongly believe one day some such simple approach will explain all of physics without the painful complications that you struggle with so bravely in your essay.

BTW I downloaded your essay a week ago but now I see that your abstract, bio and pdf download link have disappeared!!

Wishing you the best of luck,

Vladimir

Felix Lev

Dear Vladimir,

Thank you for your comments. I tried to understand your approach; on some problems we have similar opinions but there are problems where we have considerably different opinions. As far as particle-wave duality is concerned, you could read my response to Edvin Eugene Klingman in this thread. You refer to the experiment 2 2 by Eric Reiter. Your reference is a cite unquantum.net but I could not find a detailed description of the experiment there. Could you please tell me where the details of the experiment can be found.

Thank you. Felix.

Vladimir Tamari

Dear Felix

Thanks for your response. In your reply to Eugene you say that "The notion of wave is purely classical; it has a physical meaning only as a way of describing systems of many particles by their average characteristics". On the contrary a wave can define each element it is made of very precisely at any given time and following sinusoidal pattern. The problem of course is what 'element' we are talking about. Since Einstein banished the ether it is considered laughable to say that quantum mechanics could be just a description of ether elements undergoing wave motion of one sort or another. This has got to change and for the reasons I mentioned in my fqxi essay Fix Physics!. I mentioned the fqxi contest to Eric Reiter and I think he will be submitting an essay here and will doubtless mention his experiments. On unquantum.net click the Home tab and the experiment is described in a 2003 pdf in Part I of the Unquntum Effect Book.

Cheers Vladimir

Alan Lowey

Thanks for taking the time Felix. How do you feel about the concept of 'saturated maximum energy density matter' who's gravitational attraction is dependent on it's x-sectional area, rather than the amount of material?? This assumes that the surface can't emit any more force carrying particles and is at it's maximum limit, so therefore it doesn't matter how much material is behind it at that moment relative to another body of maximum energy density material. This is at the crux of my idea for additional exotic matter tidal forcing.Attachment #1: 1_Exotic_Cores.jpg

[deleted]

Dear Felix M Lev,

I have had a couple of looks at your essay. I will need more to fully appreciate what you have written. I think it is clearly written and largely accessible, even though it is dealing with subjects that are not simple for non physicists. You wrote "One of the key ingredients of QFT is the notion of space-time background" and then proceeded to argue that the space-time background might not be necessary. I agree. The reason being, as I see it, because the space-time background for objects and events emerges from processing of received sensory data and is not the foundational source of the data or output reality. That insight allows many long standing questions of physics to be answered when the ideas are put into the correct working relationship.

That holographic models do not have a space-time assumption makes a lot of sense to me. I can imagine EM sensory data spreading out as a cascade from a source and there being spherical shells of data related to the event, of different sizes within different iterations of the Object universe. Giving a hypersphere within the superimposed layers of 3D space, if all of the historical iterations are combined into an imaginary structure, rather than space-time. I can imagine how the 2D data can be intercepted and formed into Image realities of 3D objects. I do not think material objects are formed from such data but that the holographic model could have a place within the data pool existing along with material structures and particles, which are the source of the data, within Object reality.

Your essay may be even more interesting that I have yet realised. I have only picked out those parts that are relatively easy for me to comprehend and relate to my own way of thinking.You have picked a very important false assumption as the basis of your essay. Good luck in the competition.

Felix Lev

Dear Georgina,

I wish you good luck in the competition too. In the previous contest you criticized my essay for being too mathematical but my impression is that now your attitude is more favorable. In my understanding your essay can be treated as a program on what should be done. I agree with many points of this program. I believe that in my approach several points of this program have been already implemented. For example, gravity is derived from a pure quantum approach and it has nothing to do with the curvature of the space-time.

[deleted]

Dear Felix,

It is still demanding for someone without a physics or maths background but there are papers that contain far more mathematics than your own entry in the competition.For me it looks like a good balance between clear verbal explanation and some mathematical precision.

Thank you for looking at my essay. The explanatory framework answers a lot of questions but can also be used in many different areas of physics to interpret experimental results within a coherent context.It is a framework that details can be fitted into and it indicates some areas that will be worthwhile to investigate and others that are most likely dead ends.I have added a high definition version of diagram 1. to my essay thread which makes it much easier to read.

I am glad you can see some overlap in our ways of thinking. It is still early in the competition and I expect that as well as reading new entries I will return to re-read those that I have found most interesting or would like to better understand. Which is likely to include your own essay. Good luck.

[deleted]

Dear Felix,

here is a link to a web site that gives more information about the "RICP" explanatory framework used to -answer the essay question-,Reality in the context of physics I do need to spend some more time improving that web site but I think it is a fairly good introduction nonetheless. The key letters on the older version on that site were a link to the word definitions. Precise terminology and understanding of the restriction it imposes is necessary for the correct interpretation of the framework. It was not possible to include that accompanying list of terminology for this FQXi contest as it fell outside what is acceptable as notes.

Regards, Georgina.

Felix Lev

Alan, in your essay this idea is not described in detail, right? Do you have a more detailed description elsewhere? My first impression is that this is in the spirit of holographic principle that information about a body depends on the area of a surface surrounding the body, not the amount of material in the body (see e.g. a paper by Verlinde which is Ref. [3] in my essay).

Alan Lowey

Thanks for the reference Felix, I'll take a look as though it does sound much the same concept in principle. You're right, I didn't go into great detail in the essay or stress the points with repeated ideas. It's work in progress and very visual based on a lifetime of gathering the puzzle pieces. I've added a few diagrams and doodles to help explain which can be seen on my post forum at the bottom of my essay entry. Speak to you soon.

Daniel Burnstein

Dear Felix,

Though from a different reasoning than yours, I arrive at some of the same conclusions you have.

I explained in my reply to the FQXi recent article titled "Killing Time" that I find no reason to believe that time is anything else than a purely relational concept. It follows that the union of purely relational concept, that is, with space, a physical aspect of reality, is a mistake. Thus, not only can quantum theory do without space-time, so does all physics (in my humble opinion). There exist, if I am correct, no such thing as space-time.

As for space however, I believe that it an aspect of reality that does not emerge from the presence of matter or depends on it. I further speculate that space is as physical as matter. That is is as dynamical as matter (but not in the sense that is understood by GR).

On that, I congratulate you on a well written and interesting essay. I will certainly go back to it myself.

Felix Lev

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for your comments. I agree that our approaches are different. I tried to understand your essay, so far it's rather difficult.

Best regards, Felix.

Daniel Burnstein

Sorry that you find understanding the essay difficult. If there is any suggestions you have or clarifications you find may be necessary, please do not hesitate to express them.

From comments I have received in the past years, I think once the axioms of discreteness and matter are understood, the rest pretty much should follow. The problem some of my readers have been having can be traced back to trying to understand the ideas from within the framework of a theory that uses a completely different axiom set. I'm not saying that this is your case, but when it is, the easiest way to understand the ideas is to try to understand them from within the proposed system and then evaluate it for internal consistency and, later, consistency with observational and experimental data (the data, not the theoretical interpretations of it).

In the case of the essay, it may be that there is not enough space to appropriately expand on some of the key concepts. It is difficult to reach an optimal balance between the amount of concepts and the depth to which they are explored. It is even more difficult here since the ideas found in the essay were based on a much larger work, the first part of which can be found here .

That said, the important thing for me, and the only reason I participated in the contest, was to participate into and initiate discussions.

[deleted]

Hi Felix,

Good to see you participating here!

I just have one question about your essay:

Are you concerned that the vast majority of physicists would be very reluctant to *further* increase the conceptual and the 'physical' gaps between the classical and the quantum physics?

Felix Lev

Hi Lev,

I simply tried to clearly describe what I think. So whether "the vast majority of physicists would be very reluctant" or not I don't know. Probably your question should be addressed to them, not to me.

[deleted]

Felix,

This might be a legitimate concern: if you want to pull quantum mechanics even further away from the classical physics, why not to look for some framework which can accommodate better (with no gap) both of them? Or is it too big of a task? ;-)

As you understand, physics is not the science that would suffer gladly any new important gaps. ;-)

Of course, as far as QFT is concerned, you might be right: I'm not competent to judge. ;-) And it is possible that by increasing the gap you might be doing a service to the future, more radical undertaking. What are your thoughts?

[deleted]

Felix

Read please.

Very interesting

http://www.mathnet.ru/links/0626801608fe67f3de4c072e8175a7c9/zvmmf4626.pdf

http://ufn.ru/ufn02/ufn02_2/Russian/r022f.pdf

Stephen Sycamore

Hello Felix,

I'm just reading your essay. It's exceptionally clear and well-written in addition to being well-reasoned. I believe I agree with your findings essentially and would even want to drive the thinking further. I'll try to write down some of the thoughts that spontaneously occurred as I read the essay.

When you say

"The phenomenon of quantum field theory (QFT) has no analogs in the history of science. There is no branch of science where so impressive agreements between theory and experiment have been achieved."

It's hard to say how much of that very precise experimental agreement can be credited to QFT. Though the Dirac equation is far from perfect, it's outstanding numerical success for certain calculations seems to be the star performer. Would it be fair to say that it was acquired by QFT rather than having been derived from QFT procedures? The related Dirac Lagrangian is an important part of QFT but we should probably remember that all Lagrangians, specifying path independence, are no longer applicable in a topology that is not simply connected and so have limitations. The quote by Dirac which follows really sets the tone of your later arguments nicely.

This statement you make is critical I believe:

"Then a very important observation is that, from the point of view of the measurability principle, the space has a physical meaning only as a space of events for real particles while if particles are absent, the notion of empty space has no physical meaning. Indeed, there is no way to measure coordinates of a space which exists only in our imagination."

That very much reflects a point I make in my essay that the source-less Maxwell equations (for vacuum) that are used as the foundation on which the Lorentz transformation is built do not apply rigorously to any body with which you are making a measurement on. To perform a measurement you must move a charge and then it becomes necessary to employ the Maxwell equations with sources.

Lorentz, in his book on electrons, specifically states that the Lorentz transformation is proven (valid) only in a vacuum. Voigt states also that his transformation is valid only when the the divergence of all fields is zero. The E and D fields are, in principle, zero only when there are no sources. This presents a real conundrum which is difficult to impossible to resolve within the space-time paradigm.

I'd gladly discuss more details as time permits.

Steve

Felix Lev

Dear Stephen,

Thank you for your comments. I agree with your remark that "It's hard to say how much of that very precise experimental agreement can be credited to QFT....". Probably, the most striking predictions of QFT are those obtained beyond the Dirac equation, e.g. for the electron and muon anomalous magnetic moments, Lamb shift etc. It is difficult to believe that those results are only coincidences. At the same time, it's obvious that the level of mathematical rigor in QFT is very poor.

Your essay is interesting and in general I agree with your conclusions. My understanding is that you consider only classical Lorenz transformations, right? Any transformation can be considered from the "active" or "passive" point of view. The former describes how physical quantities change when a transformation is applied to a given system while the latter means that we simply consider how quantities describing a system change when we describe the same system from the point of view of different observers. What is your preference? As I note in my essay, on quantum level global transformations are problematic.

Best regards, Felix.

Stephen Sycamore

Hello again Felix,

To answer your question I suppose I would prefer the active transformation as that avoids what could be regarded as the abstraction of creating a new coordinate system. Better still is to not use a transformation at all but do the slightly harder work of modeling everything you're interested in the same frame of reference and thereby account for all dynamics of the situation. I quite agree that global transformations are problematic. There would seem to be a loss of information when you split the universe (all known facts that apply) into separate disconnected domains.

To highlight that problem with space-time, if you define the concept of simultaneous events based solely per observer, then you lose the information that all observers possess together. What all observers see simultaneously has at least as much value as what only one observer sees, doesn't it?

Louis De Broglie in "Non-linear Wave Mechanics" expressed a mostly intuitive distrust of transformations. I think that distrust is due to a subconscious acknowledgement of the potential loss or lack of information entailed in their use.

Steve

Stephen Sycamore

P.S. In case it wasn't obvious, my essay shows how one can arrive at the same results using no transformations as when one applies the Lorentz transformation. But the additional input variables of charge and mass are required.

Felix Lev

Dear Stephen,

Thank you for your explanations. We have a full agreement that transformations of the empty space-time have no physical meaning, so they can be meaningful only if charges and fields are present. How to define the Lorenz transformation in this case? In quantum theory a canonical way is such that first one should construct operators of the Poincare group Lie algebra (including the operators of Lorenz boosts) and then extend the representation of the algebra to the representation of the Poincare group. The formal procedure of constructing those operators is well-known but the problem is that nobody has succeeded in the implementation of this procedure such that the operators are well defined (in my essay I discuss this problem in detail). Maybe your modification of the Lorenz transformation will give a hint on how to correctly implement the Lorentz transformation in quantum case?

Best regards, Felix.

Stephen Sycamore

Felix,

For reasons I mentioned, I wouldn't advocate the use of transformations. We might also consider that fields transform differently than particles. It could be argued that the Galilean transformation is suitable for a particle in the case where no change in momentum occurs. But of course, as soon as the particle starts interacting with a field the usefulness of the Galilean transformation dissolves.

Field or wave equations are vastly superior and more rigorous than field transformations in my opinion and can be derived very easily from the results of my paper. So I'd argue that there is no single transformation, modification of the Lorentz transformation or otherwise, that rigorously applies to both particles and fields. And that is especially vivid when a transfer of momentum or energy occurs.

However, if you still wish to consider possible modifications of the LT, we could leverage these findings:

[math]\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{\frac{v^2}{c^2}}} = \frac{\omega}{\omega_p} = \frac{\hbar \omega}{\hbar \omega_p} = \frac{1}{\hbar \omega_p} E[/math]

[math]\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{\frac{v^2}{c^2}}} = \frac{\omega}{\omega_p} = \sqrt{1 \frac{c^2 k^2}{\omega^2}} = \sqrt{1 \frac{\hbar^2 c^2 k^2}{\hbar^2 \omega^2}} = \sqrt{1 \frac{1}{\hbar^2 \omega^2} \mathbf{p}}[/math]

[math]\frac{\mathbf{v}}{c^2} = \frac{1}{\mathbf{v_{phase}}}[/math]

Stephen Sycamore

Then the Lorentz transformation have the alternate expressions

[math]x` = \frac{1}{\hbar \omega_p} E(x - \mathbf{v}t) \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad t` = \frac{1}{\hbar \omega_p} E(t - \frac{1}{\mathbf{v}_{phase}} x)[/math]

[math]x` = \sqrt{1 \frac{1}{\hbar^2 \omega_p^2} \mathbf{p}} (x - \mathbf{v}t) \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad t` = \sqrt{1 \frac{1}{\hbar^2 \omega_p^2} \mathbf{p}}(t - \frac{1}{\mathbf{v}_{phase}} x)[/math]

Stephen Sycamore

P.S. There are some typos in the above equations and the web server here seems to have a bug in attempting to display a ' character inside LaTex code. But you probably get the idea.

Steve

Felix Lev

Dear Stephen,

Probably, it was a misunderstanding. In my approach symmetry is described by a Lie algebra over a Galois field and there are no transformations at all simply because the meaning of space and time on quantum level is not clear and a theory over a Galois field cannot involve continuous parameters. So only discrete analogs of transformations are possible and their meaning is problematic. In some cases the fact that my approach does not involve transformations was a reason for rejecting my papers. So if you prefer not to work with transformations then we have the same preferences. I thought you tried to reconcile your approach with standard problems in transformations.

I think that the notion of continuous classical field is only an approximation when a system of many particles is described by their average characteristics. In this case continuity might be a good approximation. For example, such quantity as frequency is meaningful only on classical level for describing classical waves but not for describing a single photon.

Best regards, Felix.

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