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APS Talk: The Map of Physics and Missing Phase Equations of Quantum Mechanics

336 views · Published 25 October 2017 · 20:24 · Indexed 18 October 2026

Channel: Doug Sweetser · 2017 · Science & Technology

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This was a 15 minute talk I gave at the Fall Eastern APS meeting in Kingston, Rhode Island. A new sketch for a novel framework forms the bulk of the talk. The book "Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum" by Susskind and Friedman provides a structure for the discussion. A new framework has to rebuild everything in a way consistent with all the older and useful work. While the action remains at center stage, using quaternions generates three other terms which could be analyzed using the calculus of variations. Where there are Lorentz invariant terms there are also Lorentz variant terms, those that change in ways we understand. Gauge invariance is required by massless photons, but gauges might prove useful for charged particles with mass.

The YouTube video "Map of Physics" by Domain of Science has been viewed over a million times and is well worth the 8 minutes. Dominic Walliman divides physics into three areas: classical physics, relativistic physics, and quantum mechanics. I think this Venn diagram is not accurate. Physics can be divided into classical versus relativistic physics. Then on top of that, an equation is either quantum or not quantum. The math that dictates where an equation falls can be figured out if the equation is written with space-time numbers (aka quaternions). An equation is classical if either a time or space term is a constant. An equation is relativistic if time and space are always on equal footing. An equation is in the quantum domain if a norm is involved. Those simple rules can be applied to any physics equation as long as the equation is written using quaternions.

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