2014/05/05 by Michael York, York, Michael
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #General Physics (physics.gen-ph) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #physics.gen-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1405.1098
Clarified issues concerning differing Hilbert spaces and detection sensitivity and added a section on computation of state availability. Corrected discussion of a "free" particle and other minor corrections and clarifications
arxiv created 2014/07/11 · arxiv updated 2014/07/15
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of quantum uncertainty lies with the absence of infinities or infinitesimals in observational data and that our concept of time derives from observing changing data (events). We argue that the fundamentally important content of the Superposition Principle is not the "probability amplitude" of posterior state observation but future state availability conditional only on prior information. Since event detection also implies posterior conditions (e.g. a specific type of detectable event occurred) as well as prior conditions, the probabilities of detected outcomes are also conditional on properties of the posterior properties of the observation. Such posterior conditions cannot affect the prior state availabilities and this implies violation of counter-factual definiteness. A component of a quantum system may be chosen to represent a clock and changes in other components can then be expected to be correlated with clocks with which they are entangled. Instead of traditional time-dependent equations of motion we provide a specific mechanism whereby evolution of data is instead quasi-causally related to the relative \availability of states and equations of motion are expressed in terms of quantized clock variables. We also suggest that time-reversal symmetry-breaking in weak interactions is an artifice of a conventional choice of co-ordinate time-function. Analysis of a "free" particle suggests that conventional co-ordinate space-time emerges from how we measure the separation of objects and events.