A rebel physicist has an elegant solution to a quantum mystery
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-...ght-dragan
EXCERPTS: . . . In these situations, a glaring problem comes into focus: general relativity and quantum mechanics appear to be completely incompatible. The smooth, continuous universe general relativity describes conflicts with the discrete, chunky one of quantum physics. When you bring their equations together you get nonsense.
To try to reconcile them, physicists generally assume that quantum mechanics is more or less the true description of nature and then tinker with relativity to get it to match up. [...] it has ... left physicists frustrated, unable to match juggernaut equations to reality.
Andrzej Dragan comes at this problem from a different angle, attempting to describe nature through the lens of relativity.
Decades before he first started pondering the connections between the quantum world and relativity, a link between special relativity (Einstein’s first theory describing space and time before he added acceleration in his general theory of relativity) and quantum mechanics was already well established. In fact, quantum field theory [...] unites quantum mechanics and special relativity. But it does it in a way that regards them as two independent and distinct pieces of a wider puzzle.
Dragan felt that this connection must run deeper: “It's more than just being part of quantum field theory, more profound,” he says. “It's almost as if quantum theory does exactly what relativity allows and not a bit more.”
[...] Because there is no physical evidence that anything can travel faster than the speed of light, the faster-than-light solutions are always thrown away. But, mathematically, these solutions are still valid. So Dragan thought, why not keep the faster-than-light solutions and see what happens? When he did, he uncovered a world that would look more familiar to quantum theorists.
[...] Dragan had shown that in a world ruled by special relativity, counterintuitive quantum effects don’t have to be accepted as fundamental. In other words, by including the wacky ‘unphysical’ parts of special relativity’s equations, patently random and distinctly quantum-like phenomena emerge naturally.
[...] in 2010, he received an email from Artur Ekert that would bring him right back to his musings on relativity and quantum mechanics. Ekert was and is a leading figure in quantum information and pioneer of quantum cryptography ... When Dragan finally shared his ideas on how quantum randomness might emerge from special relativity, Ekert was keen to get involved. “I thought it was beautiful,” he says. Up to then, Dragan had only explored his ideas in a toy world with one space dimension and time. Ekert encouraged and assisted Dragan to go further, and see if it still worked in the real world of four-dimensional spacetime.
[...] the paper passed through its first test with the journal’s academic reviewers unscathed. And though it went viral upon publication in 2020 and has amassed over 30,000 downloads and counting – by far the most out of all the papers published last year in the journal – the duo had (and still have) a fight on their hands to be taken seriously by the court of scientific opinion.
One physicist [...] was immediately attracted to Dragan and Ekert’s ideas ... Yet for every Vedral open to hearing out unorthodox ideas, there are many others who are suspicious of any approach that doesn’t place quantum physics front and centre. Not only are crackpots with wild unphysical concepts rife in this area of physics, but deeply rooted in the community is the idea that the mind-bending elements in quantum physics simply cannot be explained any further. They just are.
Critics from this camp question both the assumptions and methods used by the Polish pair to come to their conclusions. ...one... main criticism was that faster-than-light matter would be unstable and therefore unphysical...
[...] Often though, these criticisms boil down to two points: that no one has ever detected anything racing beyond light speed, and that if anything did travel that fast, time travel is possible. [...] Dragan and Ekert argue that these critics miss the point. “We're not saying there are any objects that travel faster than light; there might be, but that doesn't enter our arguments,” Ekert says. “What we are saying is that you can look on the world from a perspective that is beyond light speed.”
From this faster-than-light vantage point, you can swap the order of cause and effect. This is a key result because the underlying physics must remain the same regardless of whether you’re watching events unfold above or below the cosmic speed limit. And if this is true, the pair argue that the order of events no longer plays a fundamental role in the theory.
Dragan says all of this means that there are no paradoxes to answer for at all. “If you look at it carefully, you find that the rules of causality are changed. But they are not completely destroyed, they are modified in precisely the way quantum theory tells us.”
Both Dragan and Ekert admit that the paper is far from the end of the story, and that they don’t know whether they will be able to truly derive quantum theory from special relativity. But, if they can, it will transform the way researchers approach reconciling special relativity’s big brother, general relativity, with quantum mechanics. “If you convince me that quantum mechanics follows from relativity, then maybe I should reconsider what the fundamental entities are in my theory,” Vedral says. “And maybe the road to a quantum version of general relativity is very different.” (
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Andrzej Dragan's night job as a photographer:
https://andrzejdragan.com/