This will be an on-going thread. George raises interesting issues and already as a teenager saw the conflict of the local equivalence principle with quantum nonlocality and global time. Indeed Feynman invited George to Cal Tech where he got his Ph.D. Ray Chiao has more recently written about the same problem. I will take the opposite position to George that quantum theory must break down because in a superfluid and other cases of spontaneous breakdown of ground state symmetries, the condensate order parameter Landau-Ginzburg equation is local and nonunitary as well as non-linear in contrast to the Schrodinger equation that is nonlocal with entanglements, unitary and linear in the sense of operators on qubit Hilbert space. George does not want to allow time travel to the past, I do. Without it, we have no chance to escape destruction of Earth by say a close supernova explosion or any number of other end of world scenarios. I do agree however with George's dark star idea because I independently thought of it myself. I also suggest its tiny brother the dark matter stabilized shell of repulsive electric charge as Bohm hidden variables for leptons and quarks. Just as repulsive vacuum fluctuation dark energy of negative pressure stops gravity collapse, so its opposite attractive vacuum fluctuation dark matter of positive pressure prevents the shell of charge from exploding. How would George's quantum critical surface replacing the black hole event horizon apply to our observer-dependent future de Sitter cosmological horizon?
George has a Cosmological Constant > 0 de Sitter interior solution even for rotating black holes that are less singular than the Kerr solution but still have CTCs that he does not want, but I do want them. I am willing to renounce linear unitary nonlocal quantum mechanics as the complete final solution for physical reality rather than an approximation when certain control parameters vanish. Presumably, a Cosmological Constant < 0 AdS version of George's idea would be a model for a Bohm hidden variable preventing the explosion of thin shells of electric charge (i.e., solution of the Poincare stress quandary of 100 + years ago.)
So I think George is inconsistent here since his own equations (1) to (4) below are LOCAL, NONLINEAR & NONUNITARY for the vacuum condensate order parameter that he correctly puts in Bohm form with the quantum potential in curved rotating spacetime. Try as he may he can't eliminate CTCs completely even in his new dark star solutions. His alternative to the Kerr solution is interesting of course.
The NONLOCAL, LINEAR, UNITARY rules only apply to the elementary excitations into and out of the vacuum condensate not to the condensate itself. The equations of course are coupled. The coherent vacuum condensate is a local nonlinear nonunitary c-number "signal" coupled to incoherent nonlocal linear unitary q-number "noise". Two sets of rules here, different strokes for different folks.
Superfluid Picture for Rotating Space-Times
George Chapline1? and Pawel O. Mazur2??
1 Physics and Advanced Technologies Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550
? E-mail:
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208
?? E-mail:
(Dated: May 5, 2005
"The various developments of quantum field theory in curved space-time have left the false impression that general relativity and quantum mechanics are compatible. Actually though certain predictions of classical general relativity such as closed time-like curves and event horizons are in conflict with a quantum mechanical description of space-time itself. In particular, a quantum mechanical description of any system requires a universal time. In practice, universal time is defined by means of synchronization of atomic clocks, but such synchronization is not possible in space-times with event horizons or closed time-like curves. It has been suggested [1] that the way a global time is established in Nature is via the occurrence of off-diagonal long-range quantum coherence in the vacuum state."
Note I have derived the elastic LIF gravity field tetrad Cartan 1-forms from off-diagonal long-range quantum coherence in the vacuum state analogous to the irrotational superflow (see below). However, I don't need a physically real global time. Also it would not be possible to have global time in our accelerating universe over long distances because of the cosmological redshift for LIF co-moving transceivers and because it would simply take too long and everyone would be dead by the time the reflected radar signals came back to us even if they could find us. Radar is only useful in real time when the range is small enough so quick decisions can be made. For example ICBMs coming in a nuclear attack against an ABM system. Synchronizing atomic clocks over really large distances is not a useful concept. We do not have world enough and time. Dame Nature is a Coy Mistress. http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm
"Radar is an object-detection system which uses electromagnetic waves — specifically radio waves — to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects such as aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish, or antenna, transmits pulses of radio waves or microwaves which bounce off any object in their path. The object returns a tiny part of the wave's energy to a dish or antenna which is usually located at the same site as the transmitter."
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization
"It has been recognized for a long time that general relativity fails to describe accurately the physical situation in the regions of extremely high tidal forces (curvature singularities) of the type of a Big Bang or the interior of a black hole. Generally, this failure of general relativity was considered inconsequential because it was supposed to occur on Planckian length scales. In this case a rather soothing philosophy was adopted to the effect that some mysterious and still unknown quantum theory of gravitation will take care of the difficulty by ‘smoothing out’ the curvature singularities. It was recognized only recently that the physics of event horizons is a second example of the failure of general relativity but this time on the macroscopic length scales [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. In the following we consider a third kind of the failure of general relativity on the macroscopic length scales, associated with the occurrence of closed time-like curves (CTC). CTCs occur frequently in analytically extended space-times described by general relativity once there is rotation present in a physical system under consideration, which is quite common in nature."
George's "failure" is my "triumph" of general relativity. CTC's are not poison, but meat. ;-)
"As shown in [2], the hydrodynamic equations for a superfluid that one derives directly from the nonlinear Schrodinger equation are not exactly the classical Euler equations, but there are quantum corrections to these equations which become important when a certain quantum coherence length becomes comparable to length scale over which the superfluid density varies. ..."
But, I object, the nonlinear Schrodinger equation is not unitary and it is local. We have new rules. We have new bottles for new wine.
Just in:
PRL 106, 080401 (2011)
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS week ending 25 FEBRUARY 2011
Experimental Test of the Quantum No-Hiding Theorem
Jharana Rani Samal,1,* Arun K. Pati,2 and Anil Kumar1
1Department of Physics and NMR Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India 2Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Chhatnag Road, Jhunsi, Allahabad 211 019, India (Received 9 September 2010; published 22 February 2011)
"The no-hiding theorem says that if any physical process leads to bleaching of quantum information from the original system, then it must reside in the rest of the Universe with no information being hidden in the correlation between these two subsystems. Here, we report an experimental test of the no-hiding theorem with the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance. We use the quantum state randomization of a qubit as one example of the bleaching process and show that the missing information can be fully recovered up to local unitary transformations in the ancilla qubits. ... Linearity and unitarity are two fundamental tenets of quantum theory. Any consequence that follows from these must be respected in the quantum world. The no-cloning [1] and the no-deleting theorems [2] are the consequences of the linearity and the unitarity. Together with the stronger no-cloning theorem they provide permanence to quantum information [3], thus suggesting that in the quantum world information can be neither created nor destroyed. This is also connected to conservation of quantum information [4]. In this sense quantum information is robust, but at the same time it is also fragile because any interaction with the environment may lead to loss of information. The no-hiding theorem [5] addresses precisely the issue of information loss... If the original information about the system has disappeared, then one may wonder where it has gone. The no-hiding theorem proves that if the information is missing from one system then it simply goes and remains in the rest of the Universe. The missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between the system and the environment [5] ... To conclude, we have performed a proof-of-principle demonstration of the no-hiding theorem and addressed the question of missing information on a 3-qubit NMR quantum information processor. Using the state randomization as a prime example of the bleaching process, we have found that the original quantum information which is missing from the first qubit indeed can be recovered from the ancilla qubits. No information is found to be hidden in the bipartite correlations between the original qubit and the ancilla qubits. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental verification of a fundamental theorem of quantum mechanics."