Message From Director | Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics

A welcome message from our Scientific Director, Dr. Joy Christian

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Welcome to Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics. The inspiration for this research centre, as well as for much of my own research in physics, comes from Einstein’s vision for the quantum-gravitational physics, as summarized, for example, by Abraham Pais, in his classic biography of Einstein: ‘Subtle is the Lord…‘ [pp 460]:

(1) Quantum mechanics represents a major advance, and yet it is only a limiting case of a theory which remains to be discovered.

(2) One should not try to find the new theory by beginning with quantum mechanics and trying to refine or reinterpret it.

(3) Instead—and this was Einstein’s main point—one should start all over again, as it were, and endeavor to obtain the quantum theory as a by-product of a general relativistic theory or a generalization thereof.

Needless to say, what Einstein envisaged and set out to accomplish was quite ambitious. As hinted in the first item, one of the driving forces behind Einstein’s ambition was his misgivings about quantum theory. He was profoundly disturbed by what the theory had to say about the nature of physical reality. From its very inception he had recognized that quantum theory entailed a deep schism in nature. What he sought was a unified picture, devoid of any shifty boundary between the classical and the quantum. What he suspected was a deeper layer of reality, beyond the polarized picture offered by quantum theory. Here is a quote from John Bell which beautifully summarizes Einstein’s central concern, albeit embellished with his own similar concerns:

Now nobody knows just where the boundary between the classical and quantum domain is situated. … A possibility is that we will find exactly where the boundary lies. More plausible to me is that we will find that there is no boundary. It is hard for me to envisage intelligible discourse about a world with no classical part — no base of given events, be they only mental events in a single consciousness, to be correlated. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that the classical domain could be extended to cover the whole. The wave functions would prove to be a provisional or incomplete description of the quantum-mechanical part, of which an objective account would become possible. It is this possibility, of a homogeneous account of the world, which is for me the chief motivation of the study of the so-called “hidden variable” possibility.

This quote is from Chapter 4 of Bell’s book, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. The key phrase of Bell here is “homogeneous account of the world”, which is parasitical on Einstein’s phrase “uniform basis for physics” [see, for example, his “Ideas and Opinions”, p 315]. Elsewhere, Einstein explains what Bell calls the “hidden variable” possibility, in terms of the position and momentum of a free particle: “The (free) particle really has a definite position and a definite momentum, even if they cannot both be ascertained by measurement in the same individual case [unlike what is assumed in the usual Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics]. According to this point of view, the ${\boldsymbol\psi}$ -function represents an incomplete description of the real state of affairs.” The acceptance of this point of view, Einstein continues, “would lead to an attempt to obtain a complete description of the real state of affairs as well as the incomplete one, and to discover physical laws for such a description.” Following the pioneering works of von Neumann and Bell, it is possible to mathematically demonstrate that, both kinematically and dynamically, Einstein’s point of view is quantitatively equivalent to the usually accepted Copenhagen point of view [see, for example, Eqs. (7) and (8) in Section II of this paper]. In recent years great advance has been made by us in this direction [see the references cited, for example, in this paper]. Since 2007 I have shown — in several different ways — that the strong quantum correlations we observe in Nature [such as the EPR correlations] — which are usually thought of as separating the shifty boundary between the classical and the quantum worlds — are in fact natural consequences of the topological properties of the physical space itself. They have nothing to do with quantum mechanics per se. Just as gravitational effects were shown by Einstein to be consequences of the geometrical properties of spacetime, I have shown that quantum correlations are consequences of the spinorial properties of spacetime.

I have explained the spinorial origins of quantum correlations on my blog and elsewhere, so let me refrain from repeating those details here. Suffice is to say that we have made remarkable progress in understanding the topological origins of all quantum correlations, no matter how complicated, both analytically and (in some cases) in numerical simulations. For example, building on the earlier simulations by our Programing Advisor Albert Jan Wonnink, our Operating Director Fred Diether has built several numerical simulations that validate my analytical derivations of the emblematic singlet correlation. In addition, we have also made some progress in better understanding the macroscopic experiment I have proposed to directly verify the spinorial origins of quantum correlations. These accomplishments follow the advice of Einstein quoted above in blue ink, namely that we should “endeavor to obtain the quantum theory as a by-product of a general relativistic theory or a generalization thereof.’’ It turns out that for this purpose a minimal generalization of only one of the solutions of the field equations of general relativity is sufficient to obtain the essential features of quantum theory as a by-product of the general relativistic theory. Namely, what is required is a generalization of the well-known closed and compact 3-sphere geometry of the spatial part of the FRW solution of Einstein’s field equations. The non-commutative features of quantum theory (which are of course the essence of quantum theory) require that the 3-sphere, or $S^3$ , be viewed as embedded in $\mathrm{I\!R}^4$ with a graded basis. Schematically, what is required is the following generalization: $\mathrm{I\!R}^4 \hookleftarrow S^3 \longrightarrow S^3 \hookrightarrow \mathrm{I\!R}^4_g,$ where $\mathrm{I\!R}^4_g$ is $\mathrm{I\!R}^4$ with a graded or Clifford-algebraic basis. The stronger-than-classical or quantum correlations can then be easily understood as correlations among the scalar points of the algebraic representative space of this quaternionic 3-sphere, which turns out to be a Clifford-algebraic 7-sphere, or $S^7$ . The technical details of how this can be naturally accomplished can be found in this paper. Despite these encouraging results and remarkable progress, however, much work still remains to be done to do full justice to Einstein’s local-realistic vision for the quantum-gravitational physics.

Apart from supporting the above developments, we also encourage and support research on several other topics, as summarized on this page. Please feel free to contact us if you find our research efforts interesting.