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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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?

Felix

Read please.

Very interesting

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

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

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

Dear Felix,

You present a very interesting and useful point of view. Particularly striking is the lack of necessity for the notion of gravitational interaction between elementary particles. A few questions and remarks:

1. As you point out, the usual approach (e.g. Weinberg) to QFT is "symmetries first," where the symmetries arise from a "spacetime" background that is taken for granted. Your approach seems to be "algebras first," which eliminates the primary status of spacetime. Now, as you know, Alain Connes and his collaborators working in the field of noncommutative geometry begin with Hilbert spaces and operator algebras too. If it's possible to do so in a few sentences, could you briefly contrast your approach to theirs?

2. You mention (page 6) that "there is no reason to believe that [Galilei and Poincare symmetries] are exact symmetries of nature," and I strongly agree with this point. However, I am not sure if you mean that some different symmetries (such as dS or AdS) are "exact symmetries," or if you mean that the symmetry interpretation of covariance is ultimately only an approximation. For instance, you mention (in regard to GFQT) that "sooner or later quantum theory will be discrete and finite," and this would seem to definitely rule out Lie group symmetries in the fundamental picture. Do you expect finite symmetry groups in GFQT, or is group symmetry replaced with something else?

3. Following question 2, I will remark that I personally believe the symmetry interpretation of covariance breaks down at the fundamental level, and an alternative interpretation in terms of order theory takes over (if you are interested, you may see my essay On the Foundational Assumptions of Modern Physics for more details on this).

4. As you know, there is a version of QM that appears superficially to be diametrically opposed to your thesis, namely the interpretation "spacetime first," where I take the terminology from the title of Feynman's 1948 paper on what is now known as the path integral or sum-over-histories version. Of course, this approach is very general and does not actually require spacetime in the traditional sense; any partially ordered set will do (where the partial order supplants time in defining the action, which is used to weight the various paths.) I am wondering what your general view of this approach is. Do you think it is ultimately wrongheaded, or does it play some role?

5. Following question 4, I will reveal that my favorite approach to quantum gravity is a version of the sum-over-histories method, which I would call "relations first," or "interactions first." The partial orders used are causal orders, and Schrodinger equations, operator algebras, etc. emerge via path sums. I know this method is quite different from your approach, but I would still be grateful for any remarks you might have about it. In particular, if you know some good reason why it absolutely won't work, it would save me a lot of trouble!

Thanks for the great read! Take care,

Ben Dribus

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

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.