The modern concept of spacetime usually emerges from the consideration of moving clocks on the assumption that world-lines are continuous. In this paper we start with the assumption that natural clocks are digital and that events are discrete. By taking different continuum limits we show that the phase of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and the odd metric of spacetime both emerge from the consideration of discrete clocks in relative motion. From this perspective, the continuum limit that manifests itself in 'spacetime' is an infinite mass limit. The continuum limit that gives rise to the Schrödinger equation retains a finite mass as a beat frequency superimposed on the 'Zitterbewegung' at the Compton frequency. We illustrate this in a simple model in which a Poisson process drives a relativistic clock that gives rise to a Feynman path integral, where the phase is a manifestation of the twin paradox. The example shows that the non-Euclidean character of spacetime and the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics share a common origin. They both emerge from the necessity that clocks age at rates that are path dependent.
In a recent work \cite{Shaikh:2026nsi}, it was shown that for a non-relativistic particle, the operator equations of motion can be cast in the same differential form as Newton's equation of motion. This establishes a correspondence between quantum operator dynamics and classical mechanics at the level of the equations of motion. In this work, we investigate whether this correspondence extends to quantum field theory and linearized gravity. We explicitly show that the Heisenberg equations of motion for quantum field operators reproduce the corresponding classical equations of motion for a broad class of field theories. The Klein-Gordon equation, Maxwell's equations, Yang-Mills equations, and linearized Einstein equations are shown to arise at the operator level without taking the limit
ℏ→0. We then extend the analysis to curved spacetime and show that the quantum field operators satisfy the corresponding covariant field equations at the operator level. In the weak-field approximation, we show that the Heisenberg evolution of the metric-perturbations reproduces the linearized Einstein equations at the operator level. For a quantum particle in curved spacetime, the Heisenberg equations for position and momentum reproduce classical geodesic motion in the semiclassical limit, thereby extending the operator-level quantum-classical correspondence from fields to particle dynamics.
We demonstrate how to construct a Lorentz-invariant, hidden-variable interpretation of relativistic quantum mechanics based on particle trajectories. The covariant theory that we propose employs a multi-time formalism and a Lorentz-invariant rule for the coordination of the spacetime points on the individual particle trajectories. In this way we show that there is no contradiction between non-locality and Lorentz-invariance in quantum mechanics. The approach is illustrated for relativistic bosons, using a simple model to discuss the individual non-locally correlated particle motion which ensues when the wavefunction is entangled. A simple example of measurement is described.