Is quantum theory a form of statistical mechanics?

Abstract

We give a review of the basic themes of my recent book: Adler S L 2004 Quantum Theory as an Emergent Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). We first give motivations for considering the possibility that quantum mechanics is not exact, but is instead an accurate asymptotic approximation to a deeper level theory. For this deeper level, we propose a non-commutative generalization of classical mechanics, that we call "trace dynamics", and we give a brief survey of how it works, considering for simplicity only the bosonic case. We then discuss the statistical mechanics of trace dynamics and give our argument that with suitable approximations, the Ward identities for trace dynamics imply that ensemble averages in the canonical ensemble correspond to Wightman functions in quantum field theory. Thus, quantum theory emerges as the statistical thermodynamics of trace dynamics. Finally, we argue that Brownian motion corrections to this thermodynamics lead to stochastic corrections to the Schrödinger equation, of the type that have been much studied in the "continuous spontaneous localization" model of objective state vector reduction. In appendices to the talk, we give details of the existence of a conserved operator in trace dynamics that encodes the structure of the canonical algebra, of the derivation of the Ward identities, and of the proof that the stochastically-modified Schrödinger equation leads to state vector reduction with Born rule probabilities.