Not Even Wrong

For a fourth provocative slogan about quantum mechanics I’ve chosen:

Use the moment map, not Noether’s Theorem.

Pretty much every physics textbook these days explains the way symmetry principles work as:

• Start with an action functional, invariant under a Lie group G.
• Use Noether’s theorem to get a conserved charge (for each element of the Lie algebra of G).

There’s a short (slightly mystifying) calculation always given to derive this. I’d like to argue that this is really not the best way to think about the implications of having a Lie group act on a physical system, that for this it’s better to take the Hamiltonian point of view. There the way symmetry principles work is:

• For a function on phase space (or on a general symplectic manifold) you get a vector field. This is just Hamilton’s equations, giving the vector field for time evolution corresponding to any Hamiltonian function.
• The infinitesimal action of G on phase space gives a vector field for each element of the Lie algebra of G. The moment map takes an element of the Lie algebra to a function on phase space (the one corresponding to the vector field).

I’m ignoring some subtleties here having to do with the relation between vector fields and functions not being quite one-to-one.

All of the basic examples of conservation laws in physics come about this way. The action of time translation gives the Hamiltonian function, space translation the momentum, rotations give the angular momentum, and phase transformations give charge. You can get these either as moment maps, or using Noether’s theorem.

The moment map however gives you much more, with phase space providing structure that is not visible just from the action. A simple example is the harmonic oscillator in 3 variables. SO(3) rotations act on the configuration variables, preserving the action, so Noether’s theorem gives you 3 conserved quantities, the angular momentum variables. The moment map point of view however gives you much more. The phase space is 6 dimensional (3 positions + 3 momenta) and the Lie group Sp(6,R) of linear symplectic transformations acts on it, with a subgroup U(3) preserving the Hamiltonian. The U(3) includes the SO(3) rotations as a subgroup, but it is much larger (9 dimensions vs. 3), so the moment map gives you many more conserved quantities. After quantization, you learn that energy eigenstates are U(3) representations, telling you much more about them than what angular momentum tells you.

The moment map point of view also gives you quantities corresponding to the directions in Sp(6,R) that are not in U(3). In the quantum theory these act on the full state space (not preserving energy eigenstates) and your state space is a representation of (a double cover of) this group.

For the simplest possible harmonic oscillator, in one-dimension, Noether’s theorem doesn’t really tell you anything. The moment map point of view says that there is an Sp(2,R) acting on phase space, with a U(1) subgroup preserving the Hamiltonian. The moment map is just the Hamiltonian itself. In the quantum theory you find that the harmonic oscillator state space is a representation of (a double cover of) Sp(2,R), with the U(1) action on states characterized by integers, which correspond to the energy. This integrality is the essence of the “quantum” in “quantum mechanics”, and it’s quite invisible to Noether’s theorem, but a basic fact of the moment map point of view.

In some sense this is an argument for the Hamiltonian vs. Lagrangian point of view in general. The relation between the two is that, given a Lagrangian, one constructs a symplectic structure on the space of solutions of the variational problem, and thus a Hamiltonian formalism. Noether’s conserved quantities are then examples of moment maps. The problem is that typically this requires the use of constraints and the quite tricky constrained Hamiltonian formalism.

The positive argument for the Lagrangian point of view is that it comes into its own in the relativistic setting, making Lorentz invariance easy to handle by the Noether’s theorem method. This is quite true, with the standard version of the Hamiltonian formalism distinguishing the time direction and breaking Lorentz invariance. There is however a less well-known “covariant phase space” point of view, where one tries to work with the space of solutions of the equations of motion as one’s phase space. Only if one identifies a solution with its initial data at a fixed time does one distinguish the time direction. I’ve recently enjoyed reading Igor Khavkine’s review article, which in particular does a great job of explaining the history of this line of thinking.

The Lagrangian also comes with the extremely seductive point of view on quantization of the path integral. This point of view works very well for dealing with Yang-Mills theory, and I spent much of my early career convinced that all there was to quantization was figuring out how to make sense of integrating over the exponential of the action. I’m now much more aware of the advantages of the Hamiltonian point of view, especially in terms of understanding quantum theory as representation theory. In some sense what one really wants is to understand quantization in a way that takes advantage of both points of view, but the relationship between them is quite non-trivial.

The discussion here has been far too wordy for most people to make sense of. If you want to understand any of this, you need equations. Luckily, I’ve provided lots of them and many details here, see chapters 12 and 13 [now 13 and 14] for the moment map, chapter 19-22 [now 22 and 24-26] for the harmonic oscillator.

For a third slogan I’ve chosen:

Nature is fundamentally conformally invariant.

Note the weasel-word “fundamentally”. We know that nature is not conformally invariant, but the kind of thing I have in mind is pure QCD, where the underlying classical theory is conformally invariant, with quantization dynamically breaking conformal invariance in a specific way.

The group of conformal symmetries, its representations, and what this has to do with physics are topics I haven’t written about in the notes I’ve been working on. This is because I suspect we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of these topics, and properly dealing with what is known would require a separate volume. Part of the story is the twistor geometry of four dimensions, which Roger Penrose pioneered the study of, and which recently has found important applications in the calculation of scattering amplitudes.

As a more advanced topic, this slogan would normally have been put off until later, but I wanted to point to a new article by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta magazine which deals with exactly this topic. It describes several different efforts by physicists to rethink the usual story about the hierarchy problem, taking a conformally invariant model as fundamental. For the latest example along these lines, see this arXiv preprint. The whole article is well-worth reading, and it includes a quote from Michael Dine (whose work I’ve been critical of in the past) that I found heart-warming:

“We’re not in a position where we can afford to be particularly arrogant about our understanding of what the laws of nature must look like,” said Michael Dine, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been following the new work on scale symmetry. “Things that I might have been skeptical about before, I’m willing to entertain.”

Perhaps particle theorists are beginning to realize that the landscape is just a dead-end, and what is needed is a re-examination of the conventional wisdom that led to it.

For a first slogan (see here for slogan zero) I’ve chosen:

Quantum theory is representation theory.

One aspect of what I’m referring to is explained in detail in chapter 14 of these notes. Whenever you have a classical phase space (symplectic manifold to mathematicians), functions on the phase space give an infinite dimensional Lie algebra, with Poisson bracket the Lie bracket. Dirac’s basic insight about quantization (“Poisson bracket goes to commutators”) was just that a quantum theory is supposed to be a unitary representation of this Lie algebra.

For a general symplectic manifold, how to produce such a representation is a complicated story (see the theory of “geometric quantization”). For a finite-dimensional linear phase space, the story is given in detail in the notes: it turns out that there’s only one interesting irreducible representation (Stone-von Neumann theorem), it’s determined by how you quantize linear functions, and you can’t extend it to functions beyond quadratic ones (Groenewold-van Hove no-go theorem). This is the basic story of canonical quantization.

For the infinite-dimensional linear phase spaces of quantum field theory, Stone-von Neumann is no longer true, and the fact that knowing the operator commutation relations no longer determines the state space is one source of the much greater complexity of QFT.

Something that isn’t covered in the notes is how to go the other way: given a unitary representation, how do you get a symplectic manifold? This is part of the still somewhat mysterious “orbit method” story, which associates co-adjoint orbits to representations. The center of the universal enveloping algebra (the Casimir operators) acts as specific scalars on an irreducible representation. Going from the universal enveloping algebra to the polynomial algebra on the Lie algebra, fixing these scalars fixes the orbit.

Note that slogan one is somewhat in tension with slogan zero, since it claims that classical physics is basically about a Lie algebra (with quantum physics a representation of the Lie algebra). From the slogan zero point of view of classical physics as hard to understand emergent behavior from quantum physics, there seems no reason for the tight link between classical phase spaces and representations given by the orbit method.

For me, one aspect of the significance of this slogan is that it makes me suspicious of all attempts to derive quantum mechanics from some other supposedly more fundamental theory (see for instance here). In our modern understanding of mathematics, Lie groups and their representations are unifying, fundamental objects that occur throughout different parts of the subject. Absent some dramatic experimental evidence, the claim that quantum mechanics needs to be understood in terms of some very different objects and concepts seems to me plausible only if such concepts are as mathematically deep and powerful as Lie groups and their representations.

For more about this, wait for the next slogan, which I’ll try and write about next week, when I’ll be visiting the Bay area, partly on vacation, but partly to learn some more mathematics.

For a zeroth slogan about quantum mechanics, I’ve chosen

What’s hard to understand is classical mechanics, not quantum mechanics.

The slogan is labeled by zero because it’s preliminary to what I’ve been writing about here. It explains why I don’t intend to cover part of the standard story about quantum mechanics: it’s too hard, too poorly understood, and I’m not expert enough to do it justice.

While there’s a simple, beautiful and very deep mathematical structure for fundamental quantum mechanics, things get much more complicated when you try and use it to extract predictions for experiments involving macroscopic components. This is the subject of “measurement theory”, which gives probabilistic predictions about observables, with the basic statement the “Born rule”. This says that what one can observe are eigenvalues of certain operators, with probability of observation proportional to the norm-squared of the eigenvector. How this behavior of a macroscopic experimental apparatus described in classical terms emerges from the fundamental QM formalism is what is hard to understand, not the fundamental formalism itself. This is what the slogan is trying to point to.

When I first started studying quantum mechanics, I spent a lot of time reading about the “philosophy” of QM and about interpretational issues (e.g., what happens to Schrodinger’s famous cat?). After many years of this I finally lost interest, because these discussions never seemed to go anywhere, getting lost in a haze of complex attempts to relate the QM formalism to natural language and our intuitions about everyday physics. To this day, this is an active field, but one that to a large extent has been left by the way-side as a whole new area of physics has emerged that grapples with the real issues in a more concrete way.

The problem though is that I’m just knowledgeable enough about this area of physics to know that I’ve far too little expertise to do it justice. Instead of attempting this, let me just provide a random list of things to read that give some idea of what I’m trying to refer to.

• About 4000 articles a year are appearing on the arXiv at quant-ph.
• Maximilian Schlosshauer’s Decoherence and the Quantum-to-Classical Transition and The quantum-to-classical transition and decoherence.
• Wojciech Zurek’s Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical – Revisited, and Quantum Darwinism.
• David Lindley’s book Where Does the Weirdness Go?.
• Jess Riedel blogs about some of this here.

Other suggestions of where to learn more from those better informed than me are welcome.

I don’t think the point of view I take about this is at all unusual, maybe it’s even the mainstream view in physics. The state of a system is given by a vector in Hilbert space, evolving according to the Schrodinger equation. This remains true when you consider the system you are observing together with the experimental apparatus. But a typical macroscopic experimental apparatus is an absurdly complicated quantum system, making the analysis of what happens and how classical behavior emerges a very difficult problem. As our technology improves and we have better and better ways to create larger coherent quantum systems, thinking about such systems I suspect will lead to better insight into the old “interpretational” issues.

From what I can see of this though, the question of the fundamental mathematical formalism of QM decouples from these hard issues. I know others see things quite differently, but I personally just don’t see evidence that the problem of better understanding the fundamental formalism (how do you quantize the metric degrees of freedom? how do these unify with the degrees of freedom of the SM?) has anything to do with the difficult issues described above. So, for now I’m trying to understand the simple problem, and leave the hard one to others.

Update: There’s a relevant conference going on this week.

Update: I’ve been pointed to another article that addresses in detail the issues referred to here, the recent Physics Reports Understanding quantum measurement from the solution of dynamical models, by Allahverdyan, Balian and Nieuwenhuizen.