From: eric@flesch.org (Eric Flesch)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: On uniting GR with QM
Message-ID: <3dedca22.121871@news.iconz.co.nz>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:26:07 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: 210.48.22.5


It seems an odd mystery that GR should be so hard to unite with QM.
QM requires quantization, so GR must be quantized.  Now it is true
that GM's stress-tensors and continuous motion has yielded a
successful  description of physical behavior.  But more is needed to
unite this with QM.

The wave-particle duality provides the recipe.  Two nominally
incompatible guises co-exist to create our reality.  Apply this
framework to GR by combining continuous motion with discrete quanta.
How to do this?  By simplifying.

Take the photon.  GR practitioners hold that the photon moves
continuously thru space.  But SR teaches us that what holds true in
one reference frame holds true in all frames, i.e. a hit on the head
in one frame is seen as a hit on the head in all frames.  Now the
photon moves via the conduit of c, and no time passes for it; it sees
itself as simply stepping from emission to registration.  Therefore we
can generalize this and say that the photon is absent from its own
flight path, since it does not perceive itself as ever being on that
path.  Therefore the photon's flight path is a probabilistic path
holding no photon.

This simplification solves a number of conundrums.  John Wheeler's
"great smoky dragon" of delayed-choice is solved as the photon never
enters the apparatus at all.  Double-slit diffraction is engineered by
the photon being present in *neither* slit, as opposed to both.
Entangled photons are *the same photon* -- eminently understandable
from the photon's perspective of stepping across from emission to
registration in both directions, and actually splitting only when the
step has been completed.   

GR can accomodate this simplification in that the probability wave
governing the photon's flight path is described by GR's continuous
motion -- without the photon being present.  The ramification is that
the photon does not gravitate as it is not present.  This shows that
angular momentum is not exchanged where the null geodesic curves, so
the null geodesic is a true straight contour of the space-time
manifold, instead of needing to be mapped into flat Euclidean space
via momentum exchange. 

Massive particles similarly do not exist classically between
positional manifestations, as prescribed by the Copenhagen model.
What I am saying in this posting is not radical thought!  It is just
that GR practitioners seem to have been caught in a blind conceptual
alley which is immobilizing progress.  And the way out is so easy.  GR
will unify with the wave side of QM duality, exclusive of the particle
side, so unification with QM comes within reach.  The particle need
not be present between classical manifestations.

Any thoughts welcome.

Eric