Quantum theory from gravity?

[LEJ Brouwer]

What if it is not necessary to quantise gravity, but rather quantum
theory emerges from gravity?

In particular, what if there exists a classical field theory which
unifies gravity, electromagnetism and quantum theory, as Einstein had
believed?

There is a recently updated article on the physics archive which
suggests strongly that this may indeed be the case:

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0408139

Admittedly I wrote it myself, but I think it provides some food for
thought, particularly for those who continue to believe that Einstein
had been searching in vain during the last few decades of his life. I
hope to present these and further results at the Einstein conference in
Paris on 18th-22nd July.

Best wishes,

Sabbir Rahman.

[Uncle Al]

LEJ Brouwer wrote:
>
> What if it is not necessary to quantise gravity, but rather quantum
> theory emerges from gravity?
>
> In particular, what if there exists a classical field theory which
> unifies gravity, electromagnetism and quantum theory, as Einstein had
> believed?
>
> There is a recently updated article on the physics archive which
> suggests strongly that this may indeed be the case:
>
> http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0408139
>
> Admittedly I wrote it myself, but I think it provides some food for
> thought, particularly for those who continue to believe that Einstein
> had been searching in vain during the last few decades of his life. I
> hope to present these and further results at the Einstein conference in
> Paris on 18th-22nd July.

"Electromagnetic waves are found to be described by oscillations of
the underlying medium which can therefore be identified with the
'luminiferous aether.'

If you postulate an underlying background, how do you justify said
background with physical observation? Michelson-Morley observed no
aether background to 10^(-8) 1887, and today no aether to to
1.7x10^(-15)

Phys. Rev. Lett. 88(1) 010401 (2002)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 060403 (2003)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 42(9) 549 (1979)
Phys. Bull. 21 255 (1970)
Europhysics Lett. 56(2) 170 (2001)
Gen. Rel. Grav. 34(9) 1371 (2002)

Google
Kennedy-Thorndike 573 hits
Ives-Stilwell 129 hits
Hughes-Drever 1130 hits

If you start with Maxwell's equations, do you have a parity-odd
background? Optical rotation - time-even parity-odd, polarizability -
time-even, parity-odd, light propagation - time-odd, parity-odd. Both
Newton and Einstein are insensitive to chirality or achirality of mass
distribution. Linearly-polarized light propagating through lightyears
of vacuum does not have its plane rotated,

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/aniso/
http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0102093
http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/SKA/science/node11.html

Ashtekar explored chiral gravitational components,

Google
Ashtekar chiral gravity 507 hits
Ashtekar chiral gravitation 248 hits
"Ashtekar connection" chiral 25 hits

but I don't believe he claimed diastereotopic physical interactions
with opposite chirality masses.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf

[LEJ Brouwer]

You could probably have saved yourself some time by reading beyond the
abstract. Even reading the first couple of paragraphs would have helped
significantly to explain the context in which the statements were made.
I would actually recommend going through the entire paper - unless you
are either too lazy or find it too much of a technical challenge to go
through the mathematically details. (Having said that, the paper is
fairly self-contained and it was rarely necessary to make use of
anything more complicated than 4-vector calculus, so I hope the
mathematics should be relatively accessible given the paper's scope).

If you expect me to take the time to read your list of references, it
would be helpful if you could explain what each paper is about, and why
it is relevant to the contents of my paper. I have no idea what
information you expect me to glean from the number of Google hits for
your search strings, or even how those search strings have anything to
do with my work. It would also be helpful if you could explain your
statements and logical train of thought in a more coherent manner.
(Unless of course it is your intention to confuse the issue with
nonsensical and irrelevant gobbledygook, which it has to be said, is
the immediate impression one gets reading them).

[LEJ Brouwer]

Dear Zigoteau,

Thank you very much for your message. I apologise that I was not able
to discuss all of the matters you mention in my paper. This is partly
because of my own finite knowledge (for instance I had to learn quite a
bit of relativistic kinetic theory and fluid dynamics just to complete
this paper), and partly because it is unrealistic to try to answer all
of the questions which naturally arise when a new unified theory is
proposed. Essentially, one would have to address every major question
that arises in theoretical physics, and it is really only sensible to
attempt this in a step by step fashion. Hopefully others will take
interest in my work and help to answer some of these questions too.

I am currently in the process of writing up a follow-up paper which I
hope will explain the nature and origin of the small-scale structure of
spacetime in my model, and in particular, the nature of the physical
vacuum and the origin of the smallest elementary particles, including
photons, neutrinos, electrons and their antiparticles. I believe that
the description of these particles is sufficiently detailed to make it
possible in principle to calculate their masses and charges. The
remaining leptons would then correspond to excited states of these
"ground state" configurations.

Fermions in my model correspond to stable topological 4-geons, which
give them their spinorial character. Light waves, however, are quite
different in nature (they are not stable topological objects) and are
not quantised in this way. My opinion is that the apparent quantisation
of light is due to the fact that the processes by which they are
created and measured are themselves quantised, so that the
quanitisation is not a fundamental property of light itself.

As implied within my paper, underlying the description of light and the
other fundamental particles are solitons (which I actually refer to as
"plancktons" as their diffusion properties determine Planck's
constant). The excited vacuum is basically a planckton-antiplanckton
soup, and I hope to show that this interpretation explains rather
naturally the origin of the fundamental particles in a general
relativistic context. It should also clarify the origin of 'dark
energy' and resolve the 'cosmological constant' problem in a
satisfactory manner, and will contribute to the resolution of the 'dark
matter' issue. Even if all of these are not analytically tractable,
there seems to be sufficient detail in the model for computer
simulations to give numerical answers for these and related questions.

My understanding is that stochastic QM (as an emergent theory) is in
fact a non-local theory, even though the underlying classical dynamics
is local and deterministic. I wanted to avoid regurgitating the entire
contents of Nelson's "Quantum Fluctuations" in my paper (it is
available on his website), so you should be able to refer directly to
that work to answer many questions on the quantum mechanical side.
Others have done work on wavefunction collapse in stochastic QM, but
discussion of these and related matters I would like to leave for
later.

I hope that the above addresses some of your questions. On a more
personal note, I have a full-time job which is not related to physics
(though it does involve quite a bit of Brownian motion! :), so I
apologise if I am not able to progress with the further development of
these ideas as quickly as some would like (I do appreciate the pointers
to relevant references - credit where credit is due, after all).
However I believe that the model is simple and straightforward enough
that others can easily contribute (it only requires standard aspects of
classical GR after all) - and there is no shortage of areas in which
contributions can be made.

As for Einstein, I think he had a level of instinctive genius which
simply has not and cannot be appreciated by the vast majority of us.
The rebuke and mockery he suffered in the latter half of his life only
reflects poorly on those who rebuked and mocked him, and not at all on
Einstein himself. It has recently become apparent that he was even
correct about the contentious issue of the non-existence of
singularities in GR, and this is an essential aspect of the description
of the fundamental particles in my model. On the other hand, the vast
majority of physicists who continue to seek a quantised theory of
gravity have quite possibly been following a red herring all these
years, and may end up with egg on their face. Four-vector calculus is
so much simpler than the subtle and highly technical nuances of string
theory or loop quantum gravity!

Best wishes,

Sabbir.

[Zigoteau]

Hi, Sabbir,

I've just had another, longer, look at your paper, and I've worked out
a number of answers to my questions. I can't see at all how you can
justify the claims in your initial posting:

> What if it is not necessary to quantise gravity, but rather quantum
> theory emerges from gravity?

> In particular, what if there exists a classical field theory which
> unifies gravity, electromagnetism and quantum theory, as Einstein had
> believed?

There is nothing quantum about your theory. It is a purely classical
field theory. There is nothing in it corresponding to second
quantisation, and no way it could handle EPR-type emission of
quantum-entangled pairs of particles.

Cheers,

Zigoteau.

[Zigoteau]

Hi, Sabbir,


Thanks for your response.

> Thank you very much for your message. I apologise that I was not able
> to discuss all of the matters you mention in my paper. This is partly
> because of my own finite knowledge (for instance I had to learn quite
a
> bit of relativistic kinetic theory and fluid dynamics just to
complete
> this paper), and partly because it is unrealistic to try to answer
all
> of the questions which naturally arise when a new unified theory is
> proposed. Essentially, one would have to address every major question
> that arises in theoretical physics, and it is really only sensible to
> attempt this in a step by step fashion. Hopefully others will take
> interest in my work and help to answer some of these questions too.


I know where you're coming from and have a great deal of sympathy for
it. However I hope you're big enough to take criticisms on board. If
you can incorporate them in your theory it will be all the better for
it. Uncle Al's points are valid, too. I know it's hard, but self-pity
is the easy way out and won't get you anywhere.


> I am currently in the process of writing up a follow-up paper which I
> hope will explain the nature and origin of the small-scale structure
of
> spacetime in my model, and in particular, the nature of the physical
> vacuum and the origin of the smallest elementary particles, including
> photons, neutrinos, electrons and their antiparticles. I believe that
> the description of these particles is sufficiently detailed to make
it
> possible in principle to calculate their masses and charges. The
> remaining leptons would then correspond to excited states of these
> "ground state" configurations.


You are not alone, and I think you should really first find out about
all previous attempts, and what went wrong with them.


> Fermions in my model correspond to stable topological 4-geons,


I think your word 'geon' is synonymous with my 'soliton'. A crucial
element of your theory must be to show how the nonlinearity giving rise
to these structures mimics so closely the second-quantisation aspect of
quantum field theories, which are linear. It's an area that Hasselmann
has not addressed, and he hasn't addressed it because it's not a
doddle.


> which give them their spinorial character.


I don't understand this and I think it's important. Uncle Al is quite
correct that it is very hard to get Dirac behavior out of a realistic
model. Remember that when you rotate a Dirac electron through 360°,
its wavefunction changes sign, and there is corresponding experimental
confirmation. I don't think this is an insuperable problem for a theory
of the type you are considering, but it's not an easy one and it must
be addressed. The other of Uncle Al's points is the intrinsic chirality
of the weak interaction.

Current theory has its grave conceptual problems, too. Yes, it's a bit
like the pre-Keplerian epicycle theory of planetary motion, which
explained observations, but with an enormous baggage of arbitrary
assumptions. However if I may paraphrase Einstein, quantum theory is so
successful at predicting the outcomes of various experiments that any
successor theory must show a detailed correspondence to it. Part of
your task must be to demonstrate what this detailed correspondence is.

<snip>


> On the other hand, the vast
> majority of physicists who continue to seek a quantised theory of
> gravity have quite possibly been following a red herring all these
> years, and may end up with egg on their face.


As may you, because at the moment there is nothing 'quantum' about your
theory.

There may be egg on their face at some indeterminate time in the
future, but there are great wads of cash in their pockets *now*. That's
why I can confidently predict that they will stick to their guns. If
you stick to yours, then you can forget about that job you wanted them
to give you.


> Four-vector calculus is
> so much simpler than the subtle and highly technical nuances of
string
> theory or loop quantum gravity!


But by the time you have patched up all the problems with it, it may
become considerably more complicated.

Cheers,

Zigoteau.

[LEJ Brouwer]

Hi Zigoteau,

The theory is indeed purely classical (indeed the aim is to find a
classical field theory which unifies GR, EM and QT), and it is also an
explicit realisation of Nelson's stochastic formulation of quantum
mechanics. For more details, please refer to Nelson's book, which is
available here:

http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/qf.pdf

which should help to answer at least some of your questions in the
context of stochastic quantum mechanics.

Best wishes,

Sabbir.

[Zigoteau]

Hi, Whopkins,

May I call you Whopper?


> [Einstein] wasn't marginalized.

He was, you know.

Cheers,

Zigoteau.

[Zigoteau]

Hi Sabbir,


Thanks for the reference, which I have downloaded and will read with
interest.


> The theory is indeed purely classical (indeed the aim is to find a
> classical field theory which unifies GR, EM and QT), and it is also
an
> explicit realisation of Nelson's stochastic formulation of quantum
> mechanics. For more details, please refer to Nelson's book, which is
> available here:
>
> http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/qf.pdf
>
> which should help to answer at least some of your questions in the
> context of stochastic quantum mechanics.


Cheers,

Zigoteau.