Minkowski Space-Time and Quantum Mechanics

Paul O’Hara

Hrvoje J. Hrgovčić

M. F. Brown

In this paper we shall re-visit the well-known Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics. However, this shall be realized as a marginal dynamics of a more general, underlying stochastic counting process in a complex Minkowski space. One of the interesting things about this formalism is that its derivation has very deep roots in a new understanding of the differential calculus of time. This Minkowski-Hilbert representation of quantum dynamics is called the Belavkin formalism ; a beautiful, but not well understood theory of mathematical physics that understands that both deterministic and stochastic dynamics may be formally represented by a counting process in a second-quantized Minkowski space. The Minkowski space arises as a canonical quantization of the clock, and this is derived naturally from the matrix-algebra representation [1, 2] of the Newton-Leibniz differential time increment, dt . And so the unitary dynamics of a quantum object, described by the Schrödinger equation, may be obtained as the expectation of a counting process of object-clock interactions.

Miklós Banai

László B. Szabados

Abstract Penrose’s Spin Geometry Theorem is extended further, from SU(2) and E(3) (Euclidean) to E(1, 3) (Poincaré) invariant elementary quantum mechanical systems. The Lorentzian spatial distance between any two non-parallel timelike straight lines of Minkowski space, considered to be the centre-of-mass world lines of E(1, 3)-invariant elementary classical mechanical systems with positive rest mass, is expressed in terms of E(1, 3)-invariant basic observables, viz. the 4-momentum and the angular momentum of the systems. An analogous expression for E(1, 3)-invariant elementary quantum mechanical systems in terms of the basic quantum observables in an abstract, algebraic formulation of quantum mechanics is given, and it is shown that, in the classical limit, it reproduces the Lorentzian spatial distance between the timelike straight lines of Minkowski space with asymptotically vanishing uncertainty. Thus, the metric structure of Minkowski space can be recovered from quantum mechanics in the classical limit using only the observables of abstract quantum mechanical systems.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Thomas Görnitz, Holger Lyre