A Superluminal origin of Quantum Mechanics

[andresB]

TL;DR Summary

A recent article proposes that QM has a relativistic origin

A relativistic origin of QM is proposed in
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/ab76f7

It is proposed that lorentz transformation that include superluminal observers (whether those observers exist or not) explain the indeterministic behavior of QM. Not only that, it also would explain why complex probability amplitudes are used.

So, I find the article to be weird and not clear, but what's the "community" opinion on it?

 

[jedishrfu]

Everyone is looking for ways to integrate QM with GR. Some have suggested that GR emerges from QM and this paper in contrast is suggesting that QM emerges from GR when you consider superluminal particles.

I think it's an interesting idea but what do I know. @PeterDonis, @mfb and others at PF would have a more knowledgeable opinion on it. Also, I think its in a very early stage of development and that some roadblocks need to be overcome before it gets real traction as a viable explanation of QM from GR.

Why I think it's interesting is that in math, we find throughout history that an unsolvable problem may become solvable by extending our understanding of our number systems. This is how we went from counting numbers to whole numbers adding 0 to integers adding negative numbers to rationals to reals and to complex numbers not necessarily in that order. I spare you from the quaternions and octonions for now.

And in physics, as we give up certain notions and accept other more outlandish ones we come closer to understanding the universe we live in. In Relativity, there was speculation about tachyons but no real way to test for them unless we can say some particle we know today fits the notion of what a tachyon is.

 

[PeterDonis]

It is proposed that lorentz transformation that include superluminal observers (whether those observers exist or not) explain the indeterministic behavior of QM.

This doesn't seem right to me. You can't change whether the underlying physics is deterministic or indeterministic by using a different kind of transformation. The "superluminal" transformation the article describes defines a different kind of "reference frame", but that's not the same as changing the underlying physics.

What the article really seems to be doing is arguing for a different underlying physics; but that means the claim in the article's abstract that "special relativity" can account for quantum behavior is simply wrong. The theory they are expounding is not special relativity.

(Whether or not this different theory is correct is a separate question; I think it would need a lot more development before it could be checked against experiments.)

 

[andresB]

Well, as I read it, what the article is proposing is that if the principle of relativity is expanded to cover transformation to superluminal frames then the only option is to have a non-deterministic descriptions of events.

 

[PeterDonis]

if the principle of relativity is expanded to cover transformation to superluminal frames

Which makes it a different principle of relativity than the one SR is based on. The article obfuscates this somewhat by spending so much time at the start on the 1+1 case, where one can exploit the symmetry between $x$ and $t$ to make it seem like these "superluminal" transformations are just like the ordinary ones. But in the 1+3 case, that doesn't work; the article admits this and says what it calls the "Galilean" principle of relativity doesn't allow their transformations in the 1+3 case (because in the 1+3 case there are fundamental differences between timelike and spacelike that can't be handwaved away), so they explicitly propose a new principle of relativity at that point.