The Concept of Motion in the Relativistic Quantum Theory

Valentyn Alexeevich Nastasenko

Peter Holland

Problems with the extension to relativity. The Klein–Gordon equation The attempt to extend the causal interpretation to cover relativistic quantum mechanics raises several problems of technique and principle. These relate not only to difficulties peculiar to the quantum theory of motion but have to do with still unresolved issues in the underlying quantum mechanical formalism (such as the appearance of infinities in the computation of physical quantities and the lack of a relativistic theory of measurement). Some problems are common to both, such as the difficulty of defining positive densities. The subject has not been extensively investigated and in this chapter we shall discuss only some of the relevant issues. There are two particularly important, overlapping problems: Can the trajectory concept be retained in the relativistic quantum domain? And: how do we interpret relativistic quantum fields? The unresolved issue underlying both questions is the extent to which we should require a quantum theory to be ‘relativistic’. It is known that Lorentz covariant wave equations can have consequences in conflict with relativity. This, as we shall see, is indeed the case with the current relativistic formalism as interpreted, or completed, by the quantum theory of motion. Especially in field theory, the individual processes that build up and explain the covariant statistical predictions of the formalism exhibit features that are in conflict with our entrenched ideas regarding covariance and locality as necessary concomitants of relativity theory. That is, relativity is statistically valid but the individual events do not have an intrinsically relativistic character.

Mark Goodall

Sisir Roy

An attempt has been made to extend the stochastic quantization procedures introduced by Nelson in the nonrelativistic case to the relativistic case in the four-dimensional Finsler space. The space–time in the microdomain is considered to be quantized and a more general concept of probability is needed to have a consistent and complete theory of quantum mechanics.

Włodzimierz M. Tulczyjew

Fatemeh Ahmadi, Afshin Shafiee

As a serious attempt for constructing a new foundation for describing micro-entities from a causal standpoint, it was explained before in [1, 2, 3] that by unifying the concepts of information, matter and energy, each micro-entity is assumed to be composed of a probability field joined to a particle called a particle-field or PF system. In this essay, the relativistic generalization of the PF theory has been considered. The equation of motion for the PF system is derived in a form which is Lorentz-invariant. Moreover, based on constitutional similarities to classical equations of motion, a well-defined relativistic time-independent Schrodinger equation is derived, which is one of our main achievements in developing a micro-relativistic physics of PF theory. This relativistic Schrodinger equation is solved for a relativistic micro-particle in one-dimensional box to find its eigenstate and energy spectrum.