An Ontology of Nature with Local Causality, Parallel Lives, and Many Relative Worlds

TL;DR

This paper proposes an ontological model called Parallel Lives that unifies quantum mechanics and relativity by describing fundamental point-like objects with local interactions and relative worlds, avoiding superpositions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ontological framework where local lives carry relative wavefunctions, explaining quantum phenomena without superpositions and maintaining Lorentz invariance.

Findings

Local interactions enforce entanglement correlations.

Relative wavefunctions govern future interactions.

The model reproduces quantum correlations without superpositions.

Abstract

Parallel Lives (PL) is an ontological model of nature in which quantum mechanics and special relativity are unified in a single universe with a single space-time. Point-like objects called lives are the only fundamental objects in this space-time, and they propagate at or below c, and interact with one another only locally at point-like events in space-time, very much like classical point particles. The only causes and effects in the universe occur when lives meet locally, and thus the causal structure of interaction events in space-time is Lorentz invariant. Each life traces a continuous world-line through space-time, and experiences its own relative world, fully defined by the outcomes of past events along its world-line (never superpositions), which are encoded in its external memory. A quantum field comprises a continuum of lives throughout space-time, and familiar physical systems like particles each comprise a sub-continuum of the lives of the field. Each life carries an internal memory containing a local relative wavefunction, which is a local piece of a pure universal wavefunction, but only the relative wavefunctions are physically real in PL, and not the universal wavefunction in configuration space. Furthermore, while the universal wavefunction tracks the average behavior of the lives of a system, it fails to track their individual dynamics and trajectories. There is always a preferred separable basis, and for an irreducible physical system, each orthogonal term in this basis is a different relative world - each containing some fraction of the lives of the system. The relative wavefunctions in the lives' internal memories govern which lives of different systems can meet during future local interactions, and thereby enforce entanglement correlations - including Bell inequality violations.