Quantum Theory without Quantization by Ken Wharton

Hello Ken,

I am very intrigued by your essay! You may be equally intrigued by my essay "A World Without Quanta?" submitted and posted in this FQXi contest!!! In my essay I provide (among many other connections) a simple continuous derivation of Planck's Law without using energy quanta. I show that this Law is really a mathematical identity that describes the 'interaction of measurement' (and more generally 'energy exchange'). I also provide an explanation for our observations of 'energy quanta' which goes well along your ideas of how discreteness arises out of an underlying continuity when measurement takes place.

This is very encouraging! I have been a 'voice in the wilderness' for a number of years now and it is good to know someone else has similar ideas. I should include in this short list Hayrani Oz (professor of aerospace engineering at Ohio State University). He too has been using very successfully 'time-integrals of energy' (my quantity 'eta') for many years. We are coauthoring a chapter on a Thermodynamics book coming out latter this spring based on our results. Also, I should give great credit for FQXi that has provided me the space and opportunity to engage others in good meaningful discussion and not be shouted down and blocked from participating.

Best regards,

Constantinos

Dr. Wharton,

Some very interesting ideas, though I would have a few quibbles.

For one thing, the essay question is: Is reality digital, or analog. Not is the foundation of reality digital or analog. If it were the latter then the premise of your argument would be correct, the foundation of reality is analog, but it is this emergent digitalization which forms reality as we perceive it. It is a bit of a dualism between top down digitalization and bottom up analog.

The next point is that you use the constraints of the Big Bang to frame your theory of emergent digitalization, but isn't the primary assumption of an expanding universe that the only way purely digital quanta of light can be redshifted is by the actual recession of the source? If light is actually analog, there are quite a few ways it could be redshifted.

Here are some methods:

this that

Not to mention that the premise of "tired light" was dismissed, based on the assumption of a discrete model of the photon, since there was no observed scattering.

As for the premise that there are only two models of time, block time versus instantaneous points, what if time is fundamentally fuzzy?

It's not that the present flows(Newton)/exists along some dimension(Einstein) from past to future, but that the changing configuration of what is that turns the future into the past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.

We do proceed from past events to future ones, but the physical reality is what is present, so it is the present that is the constant, while the events coalesce out of future potential, into present circumstance and are then replaced, to recede into the past.

Consider that there is no way to calculate all possible input into any event, as it could be arriving from opposite directions at the speed of light. So prior to the actual occurrence of an event, its total cause is still in the future. Once it has occurred, the event recedes into the past. So in this sense, the future is cause and the past is effect.

Time then, is an effect of motion, rather than the basis for it. Therefore there cannot be a dimensionless point in time without freezing the very motion creating it. It would be like trying to take a picture with the camera speed set at zero. This means that a particle cannot be isolated from its motion. It has no fixed position. Frozen/motionless and it would cease to exist.

Same with Schrodinger's cat. Death is not an instantaneous point. It is that collapse of future probabilities into past effects which creates the process of time. Not a progression from a determined past into a probabilistic future that only seems to yield multiworlds.

Nor would we need the potential conceptual problems caused by block time, whether conservation of energy issues, determinism, or time travel.

Welcome back to the netherworld of FQXi discussions.

II. BOUNDARY-INDUCED QUANTIZATION

I call this temporary quantization. When nature puts the squeeze on degrees of freedom, you get a quantum number and have quantization of energy levels. When WE do put constraint on freedom of particles, we too cause quantization = observation related!

A free photon has free direction. If we squeeze the photon true a slit, direction is constrained and now, direction is a temporary quantum number and direction is quantized i.e. interference .

Marcel,

Hello Ken,

Knowing that the ideas in your essay will interest Hayrani Oz (Prof. Of Aerospace Engineering, Ohio State University) I took the liberty of forwarding him your essay. His reply was lengthy so I made a pdf and am attaching it here. Your ideas and Hayrani's 'Enerxaction Dynamics' appear to match well. I hesitate to include Hayrani's email in this open forum, so if you have a follow up reply I can likewise forward it to him.

Best wishes,

ConstantinosAttachment #1: Oz_on_Wharton_response.pdf

Hey Ken,

Nice essay. Actually, I'm finding your time-symmetric stuff more and more intriguing as time goes by. It's interesting to note that your broader conclusion is essentially the same as both mine and Dean Rickles' (and a few others that I've read so far).

Hope all is well with you! I nominated you for membership in FQXi, by the way.

Ian

I liked your essay. I think that your boundary induced quantization is similar to a path integration condition. Certainly with respect to past and future this seems to be the case. The individual paths will constructively and destructively interfere with each other so as to match the endpoint (BC) conditions.

There is a bit of a point which I am pondering. The big bang as a boundary for quantization makes sense if the spacetime is classical or continuous at the start. Otherwise, you BIQ is approximate. If spacetime in the very early universe has quantum fluctuations, or is quantized, then I am less certain on how one can apply that as a boundary. If on the other hand spacetime may be fundamentally classical, where quantum gravity only refers to some other field from which spacetime emerges, then this theory should be more exact. Even still I am not sure how one would treat the quantum field spacetime emerges from.

Cheers LC

Hi Ken,

good to see you and congratulations for this lucid essay. You have a deep understanding of the quantum and the ability to explain it so well. And I don't say this just because I agree so much with what you wrote :) [paper, video]. I would like just to comment that the system is quantized, with or without the boundary conditions. What these conditions can bring in is the discretization of the spectra, as you explained so well.

Best regards,

Cristi Stoica, Infinite Resolution (this year I focused on singularities in GR)

Ken,

Hmmm. I don't know if you have swayed me on this, but I will say that I have a much better understanding of the block universe concept now. I still think it is discrete on some level, but I think I'm thinking of discreteness in a slightly different way. So, kind of like the reverse of the usual way of thinking, imagine that everything is locally continuous (which I don't necessarily think it is, but let's just suppose for the sake of argument it is). How could you tell if your little local part of the universe wasn't just some discrete point in a much larger system? Or, for that matter, what if our universe is a discrete point in some strange system of multiple universes? Wacky stuff, but hopefully it illustrates the way in which I envisage "discrete" here.

Ian

Dear Ken

That was the most clearly written and beautifully insightful essay I've read. It also gave me many new answers, viewpoints and much confidence on my own model of discrete fields.(DFM) I've also learned a lot from your refined explanations. You certainly have a 10 from me, but what I'd like from you to read my own logic based but rather agricultural local reality iteration of.. ..well really of what you seem to be suggesting may be true. (which shows limits to Bells domain). http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/803

I've been struggling with it as I can't seem to falsify or find the errors in how the DFM seems to fully unify SR/GR and QT. It uses a real quantum symmetry breaking boundary transition process implementing energy changes in an underlying field structure. It also made my hairs stand on end what you referred to the ultimate boundary of the big bang, as I recently posted a short pre-print paper reaching a logical and very physical solution to how exactly that.... anyway the paper, which only took 2hrs to write as a part derivative of a full one under consideration, is at; http://vixra.org/abs/1102.0016 I would really appreciate you reading both, and advising me precisely where the errors are as unfortunately no-one has found them yet.

There are a number of other papers looking at implications, which are quite extraordinary, seeming to resolve issues right across physics. It seems to suggest our failure has been one of complex logical thought involving visualisation skills with multiple variables, and over reliance on mathematical abstraction.

I'll say no more for now, but just thank you, for your essay, and in advance for your time and hopefully comments.

Best wishes

Peter

Hi Ken,

I did not intend to be cryptic, I just wanted to be concise :). Thanks for the feedback, indeed I need to detail. If I understand well, you start with an equation describing a quantum system (e.g. Schrödinger, Klein-Gordon or Dirac). Then exhibit in the system described by that equation discrete behavior from appropriate boundary conditions. I think you did right. I think that the wavefunction is fundamental, and physical (and I don't think that the original idea of Schrödinger, who interpreted the square of the wavefunction as charge density of the electron, is that bad, only that it has some trouble when more particles are involved). This is why I agree with your approach. You name this method "Boundary-Induced Quantization". I think that your usage of the word "quantization" is appropriate, because it shows that discrete behavior arise from a continuous field (which can be the wavefunction, an electromagnetic field etc). On the other hand, what I intended to point out is that there is a standard usage of the term "quantization". This usage refers to procedures which are applied to a classical theory in order to obtain a quantum one. In the Hamiltonian of a classical system one replaces the classical variables (functions) with operators. This way, we obtain the Schrödinger equation from nonrelativistic systems of classical particles, the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations from relativistic systems of classical particles, QFT from classical fields.

Schrödinger started with his equation, which, according to the definition above, represented a quantized system, and showed that for electrons bounded in an atom the only possible eigenstates of energy correspond to discrete modes. So, he explained the discrete part of the spectrum of the energy of an electron, in this way. We can distinguish two steps. 1. Obtain quantum equation from classical one, and 2. Show that bounded electrons exhibit discrete behavior. According to the terminology I mention, the first step is quantization. According to the meaning of the word, I agree that you can call the second step quantization too. I just wanted to clarify, because one may wonder what is the relation between BIQ and canonical quantization, geometric quantization, various prescriptions for the "second" quantization etc.

Given that I see two steps, and I associate BIQ only with the second, I need to mention that I do not intend by this to say that your view is incomplete. The first step, passing from a classical description to a quantum one, is only due to the historical accident that we understood the classical systems before discovering the quantum behavior. The fundamental one is the quantum system, and there is no need to show how we go from classic to quantum. It is an artifact due to the original impression that the classical is obtained immediately just by h->0 (which turned out to be insufficient). What we need to show is the reverse, how to obtain classic from quantum.

Best regards,

Cristi

Ian -- Yes, of course you're right that there's no way to prove there's not a discrete substructure, and even if one was found, it would still be possible that there was a continuous sub-substructure under that! (etc., etc.)

But my point is that if you take QM measurements away, there's no *evidence* that anything is discrete. And if those same discrete measurements can be explained as an emergent feature of a continuous system, as I'm proposing, then there's no evidence for anything fundamentally discrete at all.

Sure, it still may turn out to be that way, but one shouldn't just instinctively point to QM as evidence that reality is discrete, especially given the measurement problem.

Hi Cristi,

Ah -- I now see where you are coming from, but I disagree with the "out" that you've provided me. I do not think physicists should simply "start" with operator-valued equations and explain classical physics as some limit of those equations. Especially given that there is another approach.

It turns out that the Klein-Gordon equation *is* the classical equation for a classical scalar field. There's also a classical Dirac field (see the last chapter in Goldstein on classical fields.) There's nothing "quantum" about these equations until you start interpreting them via operators as you describe. Yes, if you start with particles you have a problem, but recall my premise is that everything is continuous, so one is forced to start with classical fields anyway.

So why do we then go to operators? It's the easiest way to get to a framework that can predict discrete outcomes. But if there is some other way to get a near-discreteness without operators -- as argued in my essay -- then there would never be any reason to do your "step #1" in the first place.

Now, after several years spent hoping that one could get all of quantum theory by applying closed-hypersurface boundary conditions to classical field equations, I've finally come to terms with the fact that this alone isn't going to work. But I'm far from giving up on the classical field framework itself. (I've just dropped back from field equations to the classical Lagrangian densities that generate those equations in some -- perhaps approximate -- limit.) After all, if you "start" from an equation that one can't even interpret, none of the consequences are going to be interpretable, either.

Best,

Ken

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the kind words -- but I'm afraid I don't really see any connections between our two essays. Still, I'm glad my essay gave you some useful ideas.

My only comment on your essay would be that I think you would find it beneficial to treat light as a wave, especially when it comes to analyzing light in a moving dielectric or plasma. The distinction between phase velocity and group velocity is particularly crucial to your analysis (the phase velocity in a plasma is actually c*n, not c/n, for example.)

Ken