One difference is that special relativity is approximately not true at everyday speeds (or at least, it doesn’t need to be accounted for) whereas reversible laws of physics are fundamentally evident in everyday scenarios. So they somehow feel intuitively more of a useful constraint to me.
At everyday speeds, special relativity still holds, it just happens to also be closely approximated by a different kind of relativity that is sometimes called “Newtonian relativity”.
Alex Mennen mentioned this too. It would be super interesting if we could have a discrete state space that still obeyed special relativity! (I unfortunately never properly learned it.)
Stuff like relativity is fundamentally about symmetry. You want to say that if you have some trajectory τ which satisfies the laws of physics, and some symmetry σ (such as “have everything move in → direction at a speed of 5 m/s”), then στ must also satisfy the laws of physics.
Interestingly, I think you can actually have something resembling Newtonian relativity with a discrete state space, though in doing so you lose the lightspeed limit, which seems bad. More concretely, consider e.g. the trajectory space in cellular automata like Conway’s Game of Life or Critters. It is 2N2×N (writing it as N2×N rather than N3 to separate out the time axis).
Suppose we want to create a symmetry corresponding to a Newtonian boost by some vector v. That is, we need to create a symmetry σ:2N2×N→2N2×N such that if you input some trajectory τ, you get a resulting trajectory στ where everything moves in the direction of v. This can be defined by στ(q,t)=τ(q−tv,t).
I suspect that there are no interesting automata which satisfy this symmetry. However, one might be able to make some if one expanded from a cell space of 2 to a richer cell space, and also had the symmetry act on that space (for example, one could attach a velocity to each of the cells, and then have the symmetry also add to that velocity).
Still, I think giving up on having a finite speed of light is a pretty serious problem, so I think one would want special relativity rather than Newtonian relativity, and I am pretty sure that is incompatible with a discrete state space.
Ah, right. (I’ve heard this referred to as Galilean relativity.) That does seem like it qualifies as “fundamentally evident in everyday scenarios”.
Cellular automata don’t really even feel like they have a concept of velocity, just a fixed rate of causal propagation. And when things “move” it’s just that they’re making changes in the grid next to them, and some patterns just so happen to do so in a way where, after a certain period, it’s the same pattern translated… is that what we think happens in our universe? Are electrons moving “just causal propagations”? Somehow this feels more natural for the Game of Life and less natural for physics.
My claim would basically be that “velocity” as a concept only exists in relativistic systems. Because in a relativistic system, you can take any configuration and apply the symmetry to it to get a configuration that travels at a given velocity. Meanwhile in a non-relativistic system like Game of Life, only very special configurations have a recurring pattern, and they might be better thought of as spacetime crystals than as having an actual velocity.
(In fact, I think it might be useful to think of “velocity exists” as the thing that relativity is asserting, rather than “everything is relative” being the thing relativity is asserting.)
This seems too strong. Can’t you write down a linear field theory with no (Galilean or Lorentzian) boost symmetry, but where waves still propagate at constant velocity? Just with a weird dispersion relation?
(Not confident in this, I haven’t actually tried it and have spent very little time thinking about systems without boost symmetry.)
You can probably come up with lots of systems that look approximately like they have velocity. The trouble comes when you want them to exactly satisfy the rule of “for any trajectory t, there is an equivalent trajectory t’ which is exactly the same except everything moves with some given velocity, and it still follows the laws of physics”, because if you have that property then you also have relativity because relativity is that property.
for any trajectory t, there is an equivalent trajectory t’ which is exactly the same except everything moves with some given velocity, and it still follows the laws of physics
This describes Galilean relativity. For special relativity you have to shift different objects’ velocities by different amounts, depending on what their velocity already is, so that you don’t cross the speed of light.
So the fact that velocity (and not just rapidity) is used all the time in special relativity is already a counterexample to this being required for velocity to make sense.
Sure. I’d say that property is a lot stronger than “velocity exists as a concept”, which seems like an unobjectionable statement to make about any theory with particles or waves or both.
I guess there’s “velocity exists as a description you can impose on certain things within the trajectory”, and then there’s “velocity exists as a variable that can be given any value”. When I say relativity asserts that velocity exists, I mean in the second sense.
In the former case you would probably not include velocity within causal models of the system, whereas in the latter case you probably would.
As far as I know, condensed matter physicists use velocity and momentum to describe quasiparticles in systems that lack both Galilean and Lorentzian symmetry. I would call that a causal model.
Yes, it’s exactly the same except for the lack of symmetry. In particular, any quasiparticle can have any velocity (possibly up to some upper limit like the speed of light).
I had to look up “boost symmetry”, so for posterity, here’s the results of the lookup. From text-davinci-003:
Boost symmetry is a property of quantum field theory [note: actually, relativity] which states that the laws of physics remain unchanged under a Lorentz boost, or change in the relative velocity of two frames of reference. This means that the same equations of motion will be true regardless of the observer’s velocity relative to the system, and that the laws of nature do not depend on the frame of reference in which they are measured.
Very first I tried google, which gave results that seemed to mostly assume I wanted a math reference rather than a first visual explanation; it did link to wikipedia:LorentzTransformation, which does give a nice summary of the math, but I wasn’t yet sure it was the right thing. So then I asked text-davinci-003 (because chatgpt is an insufferable teenager and I’m tired of talking to it whereas td3 is a … somewhat less insufferable teenager). td3 gave the above explanation.
I was still pretty sure I didn’t quite understand, so I popped the explanation into metaphor.systems which gave me a bunch of vaguely relevant links, probably because it’s not quantum, it’s relativity, but I hadn’t noticed the error yet.
Then I sighed and tried a youtube search for “boost symmetry”. that gave one result, the video I linked above, which did explain to my satisfaction, and I stopped looking. I don’t think I could pass many tests on it at the moment, but my visual math system seems to have a solid enough grasp on it for now.
Yeah, sorry for the jargon. “System with a boost symmetry” = “relativistic system” as tailcalled was using it above.
Quoting tailcalled:
Stuff like relativity is fundamentally about symmetry. You want to say that if you have some trajectory τ which satisfies the laws of physics, and some symmetry σ (such as “have everything move in → direction at a speed of 5 m/s”), then στ must also satisfy the laws of physics.
A “boost” is a transformation of a physical trajectory (“trajectory” = complete history of things happening in the universe) that changes it by adding a fixed offset to everything’s velocity; or equivalently, by making everything in the universe move in some direction while keeping all their relative velocities the same.
And when things “move” it’s just that they’re making changes in the grid next to them, and some patterns just so happen to do so in a way where, after a certain period, it’s the same pattern translated… is that what we think happens in our universe? Are electrons moving “just causal propagations”? Somehow this feels more natural for the Game of Life and less natural for physics.
This is what we think happens in our universe!
Both general relativity and quantum field theory are field theories: they have degrees of freedom at each point in space (and time), and objects that “move” are just an approximate description of propagating patterns of field excitations that reproduce themselves exactly in another location after some time.
The most accessible example of this is that light is an electromagnetic wave (a pattern of mutually-reinforcing electric and magnetic waves); photons aren’t an additional part of the ontology, they’re just a description of how electromagnetic waves work in a quantum universe.
(Quantum field theory can bedescribed using particles to a very good degree of approximation, but the field formalism includes some observable phenomena that the particle formalism doesn’t, so it has a strictly better claim to being fundamental.)
Beware, though; string theory may be what underlies QFT and GR, and it describes a world of stringy objects that actually do move through space… But at the very least, the cellular-automata perspective on “objects” and “motion” is not at all strange from a modern physics perspective.
EDIT: I might go so far as to claim that the reason all electrons are identical is the same as the reason all gliders are identical.
Beware, though; string theory may be what underlies QFT and GR, and it describes a world of stringy objects that actually do move through space
I think this contrast is wrong.[1] IIRC, strings have the same status in string theory that particles do in QFT. In QM, a wavefunction assigns a complex number to each point in configuration space, where state space has an axis for each property of each particle.[2] So, for instance, a system with 4 particles with only position and momentum will have a 12-dimensional configuration space.[3] IIRC, string theory is basically a QFT over configurations of strings (and also branes?), instead of particles. So the “strings” are just as non-classical as the “fundamental particles” in QFT are.
QFT doesn’t actually work like that—the “classical degrees of freedom” underlying its configuration space are classical fields over space, not properties of particles.
Note that Quantum Field Theory is not the same as the theory taught in “Quantum Mechanics” courses, which is as you describe.
“Quantum Mechanics” (in common parlance): quantum theory of (a fixed number of) particles, as you describe.
“Quantum Field Theory”: quantum theory of fields, which are ontologically similar to cellular automata.
“String Theory”: quantum theory of strings, and maybe branes, as you describe.*
“Quantum Mechanics” (strictly speaking): any of the above; quantum theory of anything.
You can do a change of basis in QFT and get something that looks like properties of particles (Fock space), and people do this very often, but the actual laws of physics in a QFT (the Lagrangian) can’t be expressed nicely in the particle ontology because of nonperturbative effects. This doesn’t come up often in practice—I spent most of grad school thinking QFT was agnostic about whether fields or particles are fundamental—but it’s an important thing to recognize in a discussion about whether modern physics privileges one ontology over the other.
(Note that even in the imperfect particle ontology / Fock space picture, you don’t have a finite-dimensional classical configuration space. 12 dimensions for 4 particles works great until you end up with a superposition of states with different particle numbers!)
String theory is as you describe, AFAIK, which is why I contrasted it to QFT. But maybe a real string theorist would tell me that nobody believes those strings are the fundamental degrees of freedom, just like particles aren’t the fundamental degrees of freedom in QFT.
*Note: People sometimes use “string theory” to refer to weirder things like M-theory, where nobody knows which degrees of freedom to use...
At everyday speeds, special relativity still holds, it just happens to also be closely approximated by a different kind of relativity that is sometimes called “Newtonian relativity”.
Stuff like relativity is fundamentally about symmetry. You want to say that if you have some trajectory τ which satisfies the laws of physics, and some symmetry σ (such as “have everything move in → direction at a speed of 5 m/s”), then στ must also satisfy the laws of physics.
Interestingly, I think you can actually have something resembling Newtonian relativity with a discrete state space, though in doing so you lose the lightspeed limit, which seems bad. More concretely, consider e.g. the trajectory space in cellular automata like Conway’s Game of Life or Critters. It is 2N2×N (writing it as N2×N rather than N3 to separate out the time axis).
Suppose we want to create a symmetry corresponding to a Newtonian boost by some vector v. That is, we need to create a symmetry σ:2N2×N→2N2×N such that if you input some trajectory τ, you get a resulting trajectory στ where everything moves in the direction of v. This can be defined by στ(q,t)=τ(q−tv,t).
I suspect that there are no interesting automata which satisfy this symmetry. However, one might be able to make some if one expanded from a cell space of 2 to a richer cell space, and also had the symmetry act on that space (for example, one could attach a velocity to each of the cells, and then have the symmetry also add to that velocity).
Still, I think giving up on having a finite speed of light is a pretty serious problem, so I think one would want special relativity rather than Newtonian relativity, and I am pretty sure that is incompatible with a discrete state space.
Ah, right. (I’ve heard this referred to as Galilean relativity.) That does seem like it qualifies as “fundamentally evident in everyday scenarios”.
Cellular automata don’t really even feel like they have a concept of velocity, just a fixed rate of causal propagation. And when things “move” it’s just that they’re making changes in the grid next to them, and some patterns just so happen to do so in a way where, after a certain period, it’s the same pattern translated… is that what we think happens in our universe? Are electrons moving “just causal propagations”? Somehow this feels more natural for the Game of Life and less natural for physics.
My claim would basically be that “velocity” as a concept only exists in relativistic systems. Because in a relativistic system, you can take any configuration and apply the symmetry to it to get a configuration that travels at a given velocity. Meanwhile in a non-relativistic system like Game of Life, only very special configurations have a recurring pattern, and they might be better thought of as spacetime crystals than as having an actual velocity.
(In fact, I think it might be useful to think of “velocity exists” as the thing that relativity is asserting, rather than “everything is relative” being the thing relativity is asserting.)
This seems too strong. Can’t you write down a linear field theory with no (Galilean or Lorentzian) boost symmetry, but where waves still propagate at constant velocity? Just with a weird dispersion relation?
(Not confident in this, I haven’t actually tried it and have spent very little time thinking about systems without boost symmetry.)
You can probably come up with lots of systems that look approximately like they have velocity. The trouble comes when you want them to exactly satisfy the rule of “for any trajectory t, there is an equivalent trajectory t’ which is exactly the same except everything moves with some given velocity, and it still follows the laws of physics”, because if you have that property then you also have relativity because relativity is that property.
I just realized,
This describes Galilean relativity. For special relativity you have to shift different objects’ velocities by different amounts, depending on what their velocity already is, so that you don’t cross the speed of light.
So the fact that velocity (and not just rapidity) is used all the time in special relativity is already a counterexample to this being required for velocity to make sense.
Sure. I’d say that property is a lot stronger than “velocity exists as a concept”, which seems like an unobjectionable statement to make about any theory with particles or waves or both.
I guess there’s “velocity exists as a description you can impose on certain things within the trajectory”, and then there’s “velocity exists as a variable that can be given any value”. When I say relativity asserts that velocity exists, I mean in the second sense.
In the former case you would probably not include velocity within causal models of the system, whereas in the latter case you probably would.
As far as I know, condensed matter physicists use velocity and momentum to describe quasiparticles in systems that lack both Galilean and Lorentzian symmetry. I would call that a causal model.
Interesting point. Do the velocities for such quasiparticles act intuitively similar to velocities in ordinary physics?
Yes, it’s exactly the same except for the lack of symmetry. In particular, any quasiparticle can have any velocity (possibly up to some upper limit like the speed of light).
I had to look up “boost symmetry”, so for posterity, here’s the results of the lookup. From text-davinci-003:
I found this video on Lorentz transformations by minutephysics to be the best explanation I found, and I now feel I understand well enough to understand the point being made in context.
Here’s a lookup trace:
Very first I tried google, which gave results that seemed to mostly assume I wanted a math reference rather than a first visual explanation; it did link to wikipedia:LorentzTransformation, which does give a nice summary of the math, but I wasn’t yet sure it was the right thing. So then I asked text-davinci-003 (
because chatgpt is an insufferable teenager and I’m tired of talking to it whereas td3 is a … somewhat less insufferable teenager). td3 gave the above explanation.I was still pretty sure I didn’t quite understand, so I popped the explanation into metaphor.systems which gave me a bunch of vaguely relevant links, probably because it’s not quantum, it’s relativity, but I hadn’t noticed the error yet.
Then I sighed and tried a youtube search for “boost symmetry”. that gave one result, the video I linked above, which did explain to my satisfaction, and I stopped looking. I don’t think I could pass many tests on it at the moment, but my visual math system seems to have a solid enough grasp on it for now.
(I enjoyed this style of “log of how I looked something up” comment.)
I have a series of search case studies if you want to read more like that.
curious if you’ve tried metaphor.
Yeah, sorry for the jargon. “System with a boost symmetry” = “relativistic system” as tailcalled was using it above.
Quoting tailcalled:
A “boost” is a transformation of a physical trajectory (“trajectory” = complete history of things happening in the universe) that changes it by adding a fixed offset to everything’s velocity; or equivalently, by making everything in the universe move in some direction while keeping all their relative velocities the same.
This is what we think happens in our universe!
Both general relativity and quantum field theory are field theories: they have degrees of freedom at each point in space (and time), and objects that “move” are just an approximate description of propagating patterns of field excitations that reproduce themselves exactly in another location after some time.
The most accessible example of this is that light is an electromagnetic wave (a pattern of mutually-reinforcing electric and magnetic waves); photons aren’t an additional part of the ontology, they’re just a description of how electromagnetic waves work in a quantum universe.
(Quantum field theory can be described using particles to a very good degree of approximation, but the field formalism includes some observable phenomena that the particle formalism doesn’t, so it has a strictly better claim to being fundamental.)
Beware, though; string theory may be what underlies QFT and GR, and it describes a world of stringy objects that actually do move through space… But at the very least, the cellular-automata perspective on “objects” and “motion” is not at all strange from a modern physics perspective.
EDIT: I might go so far as to claim that the reason all electrons are identical is the same as the reason all gliders are identical.
I think this contrast is wrong.[1] IIRC, strings have the same status in string theory that particles do in QFT. In QM, a wavefunction assigns a complex number to each point in configuration space, where state space has an axis for each property of each particle.[2] So, for instance, a system with 4 particles with only position and momentum will have a 12-dimensional configuration space.[3] IIRC, string theory is basically a QFT over configurations of strings (and also branes?), instead of particles. So the “strings” are just as non-classical as the “fundamental particles” in QFT are.
I don’t know much about string theory though, I could be wrong.
Oversimplifying a bit
4 particles * 3 dimensions. The reason it isn’t 24-dimensional is that position and momentum are canonical conjugates.
QFT doesn’t actually work like that—the “classical degrees of freedom” underlying its configuration space are classical fields over space, not properties of particles.
Note that Quantum Field Theory is not the same as the theory taught in “Quantum Mechanics” courses, which is as you describe.
“Quantum Mechanics” (in common parlance): quantum theory of (a fixed number of) particles, as you describe.
“Quantum Field Theory”: quantum theory of fields, which are ontologically similar to cellular automata.
“String Theory”: quantum theory of strings, and maybe branes, as you describe.*
“Quantum Mechanics” (strictly speaking): any of the above; quantum theory of anything.
You can do a change of basis in QFT and get something that looks like properties of particles (Fock space), and people do this very often, but the actual laws of physics in a QFT (the Lagrangian) can’t be expressed nicely in the particle ontology because of nonperturbative effects. This doesn’t come up often in practice—I spent most of grad school thinking QFT was agnostic about whether fields or particles are fundamental—but it’s an important thing to recognize in a discussion about whether modern physics privileges one ontology over the other.
(Note that even in the imperfect particle ontology / Fock space picture, you don’t have a finite-dimensional classical configuration space. 12 dimensions for 4 particles works great until you end up with a superposition of states with different particle numbers!)
String theory is as you describe, AFAIK, which is why I contrasted it to QFT. But maybe a real string theorist would tell me that nobody believes those strings are the fundamental degrees of freedom, just like particles aren’t the fundamental degrees of freedom in QFT.
*Note: People sometimes use “string theory” to refer to weirder things like M-theory, where nobody knows which degrees of freedom to use...