RealClock Quantum Mechanics: Preface, Chapter 1. Executive overview, Chapter 2. RealClock quantum kinematics These are the preliminary version of the firsts chapters from the book project RealClock Quantum Mechanics, where I explore a simple but powerful idea: the “phase” of a quantum state isn’t an abstract mathematical trick — it’s a real internal clock with a geometric orientation that gets transported, compared, and rotated just like any other physical structure. These chapters introduce the core ingredients of the framework: energy as the rotation rate of this internal clock, spin as the representation carried by the seed, mass as the intrinsic ticking frequency, charge as the weight of about‑axis transport, and a new structural degree of freedom — time‑chirality — that cleanly separates clock handedness from energy. None of this changes the successful predictions of quantum mechanics or relativity; it reorganizes them into a single transport picture that is operational, geometric, and experimentally grounded. If you’re curious about quantum mechanics and how phase, spin, gauge transport, and gravity can be understood as different limits of one unified mechanism, these chapters are a good place to start.
This chapter, based on the background information of the previous chapter, will review the formalism of quantum mechanics – its fundamental mathematical structure (the basic contents of Hilbert space representation and operator algebra representation) and physical assumptions (kinematics, dynamics, and measurement theory). These are the premise and foundation for discussing the quantum histories interpretation. Then, in combination with the viewpoints of some literature in recent years, we will explore what is the interpretation of quantum mechanics, analyze the relationship between the theory of quantum mechanics and its interpretation, and declare the author’s basic stance on these two issues. These two are the primary issues that all interpretive work in the philosophy of physics will face (not limited to the interpretation of quantum mechanics), and the necessary clarification here is also conducive to the subsequent discussion. Three common terms – theory, formalism, and interpretation – are explicated and differentiated by offering the necessary definitions of their meanings, based on the works of Acuña and Ruetsche. The clarification will help to make the subsequent related discussions more precise.
We explore aspects of perturbative quantum field theory towards the goal of illuminating features of quantum gravity. In Chapter 1, we begin with the color-kinematic duality, a surprising relationship between gauge theoretic and kinematic properties of scattering amplitudes that, via the double-copy property, leads to a deep connection between gauge theory and gravity. We investigate the relationship between the color-kinematic duality and amplitude relations in ABJM theory and find that the duality is satisfied eight points without associated amplitude relations present in all other known instances of the duality. In Chapter 2, we derive a basic consistency check for AdS3/CFT2, a tractable example of the well-known AdS/CFT duality. We show that, under certain mild assumptions on the light spectrum of the CFT, CFT correlators of light operators match those computed in AdS perturbatively in 1/N: in a black hole background for high temperatures, and in thermal AdS for low temperatures. Next we turn to entanglement entropy, an information-theoretic quantity that in the CFT may encode dual AdS geometry. Time-dependent entanglement entropy has been studied for generic excited states. However, localized unitary operators in particular are in correspondence with Hamiltonian perturbations, and are basic building blocks of local excitations. In Chapter 3, we detail these operators' locality properties as well as the differences between excited states created by Hermitian operators and those created with localized unitary operators. In Chapter 4, we initiate the perturbative exploration of entanglement entropy with a time-dependent Hamiltonian, computing past first order in perturbation theory. We find a universal structure of entanglement propagation: interactions entangle unentangled excitations according to entanglement diagrams that track the flow of entanglement. We provide diagrammatic tools to simplify computations of loop entanglement diagrams.