An Ontology of Nature with Local Causality, Parallel Lives, and Many Relative Worlds

Abstract

Parallel Lives (PL) is an ontological model of nature in which quantum mechanics and special relativity are unified in a single universe with a single space-time. Point-like objects called lives are the only fundamental objects in this space-time, and they propagate at or below c, and interact with one another only locally at pointlike events in space-time, very much like classical point particles. Lives are not alive in any sense, nor do they possess consciousness or any agency to make decisions -they are simply point objects which encode memory at events in space-time. The only causes and effects in the universe occur when lives meet locally, and thus the causal structure of interaction events in space-time is Lorentz invariant. Each life traces a continuous world-line through space-time, and experiences its own relative world, fully defined by the outcomes of past events along its world-line (never superpositions), which are encoded in its external memory. A quantum field comprises a continuum of lives throughout space-time, and familiar physical systems like particles each comprise a subcontinuum of the lives of the field. Each life carries a hidden internal memory containing a local relative wavefunction, which is a local piece of a pure universal wavefunction, but it is the relative wavefunctions in the local memories throughout space-time which are physically real in PL, and not the universal wavefunction in configuration space. Furthermore, while the universal wavefunction tracks the average behavior of the lives of a system, it fails to track their individual dynamics and trajectories. There is always a preferred separable basis, and for an irreducible physical system, each orthogonal term in this basis is a different relative world -each containing some fraction of the lives of the system. The relative wavefunctions in the lives' internal memories govern which lives of different systems can meet during future local interactions, and thereby enforce entanglement correlations -including Bell inequality violations. These, and many other details, are explored here, but several aspects of this framework are not yet fleshed out, and work is ongoing. OverviewThis model has been developed in the spirit of Einstein [1], Aharonov [2], and others, which can be loosely summarized by the sentence, "Once you can explain the workings of nature with the right physical story, the mathematical formalism will follow." I am not so presumptuous as to think that this is the right physical story, but I do believe that this model possesses a remarkable degree of elegance and simplicity, and thus warrants serious consideration. Here I attempt to present the most important parts of the story, after which I examine several specific details, examples, and questions.The guiding principle for the development of this ontology is that there should be only one space-time in the universe, in which all objects reside, and the only fundamental objects should be point-like 'lives' that move along world lines like classical point particles,...

Understanding quantum mechanics: a review and synthesis in precise language

“…-A combination of the first and third of these approaches may be consistent with determinism [446]. -In other suggested approaches, branches are factual and counterfactual descriptions of one world [447], or differing trajectories, in spacetime, of point-like elements with a local internal memory [448].…”

Local Quantum Theory with Fluids in Space-Time

“…The set of indexed single-particle wavefunctions in any product basis can be trivially extracted from this state, which is also to say that the external memory can be trivially extracted from the internal memory. Each term in the superposed state represents a separate spatial wavefunction of the system, each with its own complex coefficient, and the term itself becomes the index of that wavefunction (this treatment differs from previous discussions [11] where the external-memory-history of each particle was tracked. This turns out to needlessly complicate the formalism, so we have removed it from the present treatment).…”

“…Because of this erasure/rewriting process, there is no restriction on the matching between a given copy's prior external memory, and its new external memory, provided that the final proportions match the final internal state. Previous versions of this model [11] attempted to track the external memory history of each copy, and to develop rules for the proportion of each former memory that is reset to each new memory during the interaction. While such histories must exist in this model, there can never be any macroscopic empirical evidence of them, nor of the erasure/rewriting process, so these rules cannot be uniquely determined.…”

“…The present model is an attempt to interpret the empirical data from table-top quantum experiments, rather than high energy particle collisions, using the QED structure, by reconstructing the information content of Schwinger's space-time state vector using more familiar single-particle spatial wavefunctions. This turns out to be the natural theoretical framework for refining the local Schrödinger picture of the Parallel Lives interpretation of quantum mechanics [10,11], and should also be consistent with (but not identical to) the local Heisenberg picture frameworks that have been developed elsewhere [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. I recommend perusing the detailed examples in the Supplemental Information as you read this article to help develop a clear idea of the local hidden variable treatment for Wigner's friend, Mach-Zehnder Interferometers, Wheeler's Delayed Choice, the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, and Quantum Teleportation.…”