00:00 - 17:0017:00 - 19:00

12:00 AM
there's two ways i know how to get the trajectory of an object in motion. the first is to take a video and see where it is, frame by frame
in that case we have the notion of trajectory as position at successive times
which is very convenient
but, suppose i didn't have a camera
like, all i have is a stopwatch
while it's much more tedious, i could still do the following: measure the time to go from x=0 to 1, from x=0 to 2, from x=0 to 3, etc
the difference is that i'm not ever in the position of measuring the trajectory of a single experiment. the best i can do is run the same experiment over and over and use that to build up a trajectory
and that's closer to how velocity works for pilot wave. you give up on being able to track one motion successively over time, in favor of running the experiment repeatedly over different times and buliding up a trajectory from that
that doesn't render the pilot wave story trivial or obvious, but i don't think the trajectory story is absurd on its face.
(the implications, on the other hand...)

Well this point we're talking about is what Bohm brought up as his way to suggest the beginnings of an alternative interpretation, so that's something :p

12:15 AM
fair. i just don't see much point focusing too much on Bohm in particular
also Bell's intro to pilot wave is short and sweet

Reference?

i'm specifically speaking about the pilot wave part, mind. i've seen plenty of debate about whether Bell's presentation of the older "no hidden variables" proofs is accurate
(my own reading is that what von Neumann shows is that, if you want the Hilbert space structure of observables to reign supreme, then there's really no place for hidden variables. pilot wave is happy to use hermitian operators to provide book-keeping for wavefunction statistics, but it cannot and does not grant them any higher status than that.)

12:40 AM
I'll give it a read another day, I would suggest giving this of his a read as well

yeah, he has some of that 'against measurement' talk in the paper i linked too

The Einstein quote he starts with is basically the argument Bohm also gives at the start

yeah
which is funny given that Bell's own attitude toward the problem of reconciling SR with QM is to flip Einstein the bird and assume an absolute reference frame
tho you could view the Bell inequality as asserting that "Einstein was never going to like QM"

1:00 AM
When this is what is meant by hidden variables, it's not a bad idea, I just think it simply means that everything which comes after it needs to be questioned from first principles again
(I don't know what he means about Einstein and von Neumann and co-existence)

6 hours later…
7:03 AM
0

I have a question about my Physics Stack Exchange post: Is sufficient to have some anti-gravity generator to make a Alcubierre drive? Where should ask this question?

7:15 AM
"Local conservation also implies global conservation; that the total amount of the conserved quantity in the Universe remains constant" is given in Wikipedia page of conservation laws.
But Energy is something which is locally conserved but not globally right?
In context of GTR

7:31 AM
@ManasDogra Physicists argue about this. Most physicists I know would say energy is not conserved in an expanding universe, however there is a alternative view that energy is conserved provided you calculate the energy in the right way. Philip Gibbs is the name I associate with this view. I have a link somewhere to his articles on the subject.
Note that although this is on Vixra Philip Gibbs is a mainstream and well respected physicist. He helped set up Vixra and published various articles on it in a desperate (and largely failed) attempt to make it respectable.

Thank you so much...I think the wiki page should be updated :/
Can it be possible that global conservation of energy is retained if/when quantum gravity is used?

The large scale limit of any quantum gravity theory is going to be GR, and in GR energy is not conserved (or is conserved depending on how you look at it), so quantum gravity is not going to change the global properties.

7:50 AM
Oh right!

8:10 AM
I guess I should qualify this and say that as far as we know the large scale limit of QG will be GR. It could turn out to be MOND/TeVeS or some other theory that we don't know yet.

@ManasDogra The fundamental problem with that is that you need to write down a definition of "energy" and "conservation" that plays nice with the fact that "time" is a malleable notion in GR
the usual definition of energy in non-GR is as the Noether charge associated to time translation
but in GR you need to figure how to translate a) Noether's theorem and b) "time translation" to its settings, and that's where the controversy starts

8:33 AM
@Semiclassical what do you mean with "reify"? As in, "realifying?"
@Semiclassical I find it mildly amusing that one would consider a "many-world theory" to be "reifying" QM lol
things like "the wavefunction branches as different universes" are simply sentences devoid of content in my book

@ACuriousMind non GR? Why would that be violated in GR?

@glS reify is a word

at least pilot-wave gives you an alternative mathematical framework, which is always nice. But I can never seem to figure out whether this mathematical framework is actually equivalent to the standard one or not... or if it is known whether it is

@ManasDogra well, what's "time translation" in GR?
what does "conservation" mean in a context where you don't have a unique time derivative?

@ACuriousMind uh, go figure. I was assuming it was a made-up word playing on making complex numbers real so I didn't even look it up.

8:40 AM
It's a very...philosophical word :P
I've never heard it used anywhere outside of epistemological discussions

@ACuriousMind Well can't we use a proper frame?
Oh there's no global proper frame

the "simple" parallel to Noether's theorem in GR is via Killing vectors - you can associate uncontroversial "conserved quantities" to each Killing field, but there's no guarantee that your spacetime has a time-like Killing field that you could associate with energy (in fact FLRW doesn't and that's why many people say there's no conserved energy in an expanding universe). See e.g. physics.stackexchange.com/q/218121/50583 for more technical discussion of Killing fields and conservation

Great! Now you guessed it correctly that I had the doubt in the context of FLRW metric!

8:56 AM
There is also local conservation in GR
And you can use the Einstein pseudotensor to attempt for global conservation
Although really even in a totally flat spacetime you can have no energy conservation
So don't get too attached to energy conservation
People didn't even really know about energy conservation until like the 19th century, it's not like it's an obvious idea and a fundamental principle

4 hours later…
12:49 PM
"Conversely, a pair of classic results, due to Barrett, show that there is a certain sense in which, given appropriate “holonomy data” on a manifold M, there always exists a principal bundle over M and a principal connection on that bundle such that the holonomy data arises as the holonomies of that connection, and that this bundle is, in a sense to be explained, unique."
"In a sense to be explained" isn't a good sign

1:33 PM
"Since much of the theory has a strong algebraic topological flavor to it, the first thing to try, and in fact discard, is the compact-open topology."

@glS in the sense that many-worlds seems to insist that 'other universes' talk is supposed to be taken as 'real' rather than as merely figurative
@glS it is equivalent. you start with a time-dependent wavefunction, write down the probability current density $\vec{j}$ and probability density $\rho$, and define a velocity field $\vec{v}=\vec{j}\rho$. All you've added are symbols; everything that's in those definitions is just the standard formalism.
What you can then show: Suppose you start with some closed surface $S_0$ at time 0, and ask for the probability to find the particle within that surface at that time. That'll be some $P(S_0)$
bah, bad typo: $\vec{v}=\vec{j}/\rho$
now allow the points on that surface to flow along the velocity field $\vec{v}=\vec{j}/\rho$ for a time $t$. that'll bring the original surface $S_0$ to some new surface $S_t$
and now you can ask for the probability to find the particle within that new surface
what you can show is that the choice $\vec{v}=\vec{j}/\rho$ guarantees $P(S_0)=P(S_t)$
so this is a flow which preserves probabilities
the argument then is that this is what you'd expect if the particle really was moving along that velocity field, with some probability distribution on its initial position
and thus interpret that velocity field as determining 'real' trajectories for the particle
thing is: what you ultimately predict operationally is still based on wavefunction statistics
that part of the story hasn't changed
it's just that you've chosen to interpret some part of the theory as "real" which the orthodox view would just treat as "formal"
so to me the problem isn't really whether you can do so, but whether you should

1:52 PM
the theory is supposed to be deterministic but nonlocal, no?

yep. the issue is that $\vec{j},\rho$ are really functions in configuration space
so 3N-dimensional for N particles
if you do this for one particle there's nothing nonlocal
but two particles? yuuuuup

so you are saying, the "velocity" is not velocity in the physical "space over time" sense, but rather a velocity in the configuration space

right. you can map it into real space (b/c each particle configuration space is itself 3D) but its natural home really is 3ND
there's a fairly famous statement by Bell on this point, let me find it

I don't get it. For two particles, you say 6 dimensions because you assume 3 spatial dimensions per particle. But that just sounds like having a standard pair of velocities characterising the motion of each particle

"No one can understand this theory until he is willing to think of ψ as a real objective field rather than just a ‘probability amplitude’. Even though it propagates not in
3-space but in 3N-space."

1:59 PM
I don't understand what's nonclassical about this. Don't you get the same description if you model, say, two classical particles using a configuration space?

nope. there's no analog of the wavefunction as a guiding field in ordinary Newtonian mechanics
let me try to put the point like this

sure.. but you didn't talk about "guiding fields" in the above description

it's implicit in the fact that $\rho,\vec{j}$ are derived from the Schrodinger equation
hang on, have to start up a zoom meeting for students

so... in other words, the description above is just a standard classical way to describe the motion of a bunch of particles. What changes is their actual dynamics, which for the pilot wave follows completely different rules
sure

it's classical for configuration space, at least
there's not really a good way to make a phase space
the problem is that, unlike in classical mechanics, the velocity (and thus the momentum) can't be taken as an independent variable
in classical mechanics, it makes sense to say "suppose the particle starts at position x with momentum p"
in pilot wave shenanigans, though: if i tell you the wavefunction, and that the particle is found at position $x$ at time $t$, then the wavefunction determines the instantaneous velocity as $\vec{v}=\vec{j}(x,t)/\rho(x,t)$
which means i have absolutely no freedom to specify the momentum
you could still track the momentum of the particle, but it's subservient to the particle's configuration space trajectory
which is decidedly not classical

2:10 PM
I mean, talking about $\vec j$ and $\vec v$ sounds essentially the same here, modulo standard shenanigans due to using a description with densities rather than exact positions. So the nontrivial aspect is the fact that the $\vec j$ (equivalently, $\vec v$) is determined by the position, you are saying?
so... maybe the culprit here is the fact that the probability current is defined from spatial first derivatives of the wavefunction/position? Whereas in the classical case you take the time-derivative, which thus adds an additional dof

2:25 PM
Argh
I have a million unfinished articles on my site and a lot of them depend on other articles
I think I need to make a flowchart of them
To find out in what order to do them

Result: A million unfinished articles and an unfinished flowchart

2:41 PM
@glS got pulled away, but this is exactly right
i'll note, though, that the story I've been telling is Bell's approach to pilot wave theory
which very much emphasizes the role of the wavefunction as providing guidance for the particles. the usual statement is that Bell's approach is 'first-order' in time
whereas Bohm's story "looks" a lot closer to classical mechanics and seems like it's second-order...but i'd say that's deceptive
My own gloss on this: what QM faces you with is the failure of classical phase space
orthodox QM interprets that as having to sacrifice "phase space" in favor of momentum and position as operators
pilot wave whereas sacrifices phase space in order to preserve configuration space
but local in configuration space =/= local in real space
and it's kinda suspicious that one should take a story about trajectories in 3N-dimensional configuration space as real
there's nothing stopping you from doing so, and there are some nice mathematical features to doing so
but it's a bit hard to swallow

@ACuriousMind Flowchart shouldn't be too hard
the physics bit is hard tho
bc science

people have argued about whether you can get from configuration space back to just real space, e.g., arxiv.org/abs/1410.3676

I should have been writing about movies which I think are cool instead

to which i shrug
anyways. there are definitely things to criticize about pilot wave, to be clear. but i don't count internal consistency nor compatibility with QM amongst them

2:57 PM
Is there a description of (classical) EM purely from holonomies?
No fields, just a big pile of holonomies

ugh, why is mathematica giving me nonsense
actually, better question
why tf is mathematica so slow at this calculation

@Slereah since the holonomy of the 4-potential $A$ around a loop is the magnetic flux through the loop, that would just be a list of magnetic fluxes
I don't think the fluxes are enough to reconstruct all of EM since they tell you nothing about electrostatics

i mean, yes, this graph is huge: 45360 directed edges on 5040 vertices

@Semiclassical efficient algorithms are hard, yo

but all i'm asking mathematica for is "find some small cycles that start at 1"
like, there's trivially nine 2-cycles
and it can find one of them, but craps out if i ask it to find more than one

3:09 PM
at least the "naive" algorithm to find all cycles is quadratic in the number of vertices
if you ask it to find just one, it can stop and doesn't have to run the full thing

hmm
i guess. i'm not shocked by the notion that "finding all cycles is hard", to be clear
it's that there'd be such a jump from "find one cycle" to "find two cycles"
there's also something suspicious going on: mathematica isn't having trouble finding (short) paths between two different vertices
it does that fast
but in that case it shouldn't be so slow to find other cycles: start at the origin, move to an adjacent vertex, and look for paths between the origin and said vertex

no, wait, the quadratic is for finding a single cycle
the algorithm for finding all cycles is worse than any polynomial

wat
jeeze
hmm.

the problem is that there are potentially $n^k$ cycles of length $k$ in a graph with $n$ vertices

i am restricting further to cycles of length k for small k, mind
like, $k\leq 4$
heck, right now i'd be happy to just verify k=2

3:15 PM
so the worst-case complexity for fixed length $k$ is $n^k$ (it takes $n^k$ to even list all cycles in that worst case), if you restrict to $k\leq 4$ you have worst-case complexity $n^4$

hmm
so 5040^2 ~ 2.5e6
that's not great

there's some discussion of finding cycles on MO here

an obvious route would be to write down the adjacency matrix and multiply
though the fact that said matrix is 5040-by-5040 is...less appealing
hmm, it works better than i expected. probably because the complete graph on 5040 vertices (lol) has 13million edges, so 45k edges is very sparse in those terms
on that basis, seems there's nine 2-cycles (which i knew), zero 3-cycles (which i hadn't thought about but makes sense from the problem) and 177 4-cycles

3:38 PM
@Semiclassical so wait, are you saying that the mysterious "potential" guiding particles in pilot-wave theory is just the wavefunction following Schrodinger? So solve for the wavefunction, then interpret squared modulus as density of particles, and current density as their velocities? I thought it was more complicated than this

yes and no
yes, insofar as said potential is determined by the wavefunction
also, it's not current density that serves as velocity, it's current density / density

right, sorry, meant probability current density

sure
unfortunately, the specific form of the quantum potential for Bohm looks pretty mysterious

but the normalisation over the density you can dispose of if you think in terms of particles with definite positions, no?

no, because individual particles still have a probability density for their position
also the units don't really work
probability current density is 1/m^3 *m/s

3:42 PM
so you can't reduce it to the case of point particles? I was understanding it like in classical EM etc: you can discuss of point particles and their velocities, or of densities $\rho$ and current $J$

yeah, the problem is that this is still supposed to work for a single particle
it's not an ensemble interpretation
to the extent that there's an ensemble, it's of hypothetical initial positions
not an ensemble of many particles
also, the "no" part of my statement above: in Bohm's formulation you write down the Hamilton-Jacobi equation with potential $V(x,t)-\frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\frac{\nabla^2 \sqrt{\rho}}{\sqrt{\rho}$

@Semiclassical I don't understand how you actually solve the dynamics. You solve for the wavefunction, that's fine. Then you set as "initial condition" the position of the particle, and determine the direction in which it goes via the probability current density, is this correct?

via $\vec{j}/\rho$. it's the flowlines of that ratio
though in terms of the local directions you're right

so the wavefunction determines in which direction the particles move. Which in fairness is compatible with calling it a "pilot wave theory". And I suppose wavefunction and particles would have to evolve simultaneously

right
there is a complaint people raise here

3:49 PM
what about discrete degrees of freedom? How do you make sense of those?

that the interaction is basically one way: wavefunctions interact with each other, and wavefunctions tell particles where to go, but particles don't act on wavefunctions as such
@glS same as you'd treat discrete dof's for the Schrodinger equation: replace the scalar wavefunction with a vector-valued wavefunction
the definition of the velocity gets a bit more complicated now, lemme see

@Semiclassical yes, but in this particle picture measuring a photon in polarization H means the particle is in that state, right? How do you handle it changing its polarization state? You cannot talk of velocities there. Can particles jump?

tbh i'm not sure how you'd do it for photons
oh
for spins, though, no

@Semiclassical actually, the above doesn't even make that much sense. The particle would have a definite state in all spin directions, this being a hidden variable theory and all, right? How do you even define the configuration space in that case then?

the way spin measurement works in pilot wave theory is that the interaction makes the wavepacket separate into two pieces, one deflected up and one deflected down
again, no
in pilot wave theory, to say that a particle is "spin-up" is to say that the particle was measured to be in the wave packet that was deflected up
there's no assignment of a specific spin dof. (at least not in the Bell way of doing it, Bohm's way is different and i don't know it that well)
spin is very much contextual in pilot wave theory as i know it
there's no hidden variable that says "this particle is spin-up in the Z-direction" prior to measurement

3:56 PM
but there must be some property of the particle determining whether it goes "up" or "down", conditionally to what is being measured?

yes. but that property is the position itself, at least if we're doing a one-particle measurement
suppose you start out with a wavepacket and you send it into a +z-oriented Stern-Gerlach device
the particle will be somewhere in that wavepacket, with a fifty-fifty chance of being in the top half or bottom half
the wavepacket passes through the device and splits into two pieces, one deflected up and the other deflected down
if the particle started out in the upper half of the wavepacket, it'll keep moving with that portion. if it's in the lower portion, it'll keep moving with that portion
so there is a property here, but it's only "where did the particle start out in the wave packet"
this is characteristic of pilot wave theory: position is noncontextual, but everything else is contextual
(which, if that seems exceptionally asymmetric, welcome to the party)
source for this: arxiv.org/abs/1305.1280

but think about the particle before entering the measuring device. There must be something that will interact with the measurement setting, in such a way that the particle will always go up if I'm measuring, say, in the Z direction, but will go 50/50 if I'm measuring in X
would this be a property of the particle, or the wavefunction?

wavefunction
i think

so the choice of measurement setting determines the wavefunction, and the particle just surfs on it

to be clear, in my initial setting i was assuming an unpolarized source
in which case what i was saying is fine
what i was leaving out is that once the wavepackets separate, you have something like $\binom{1}{0}\psi_0(x,t)+\binom{0}{1}\psi_1(x,t)$
so if you track the first wavepacket, you've got $\binom{1}{0}\psi_0(x,t)$
and that has an impact on how this wavepacket will now interact with another Stern-Gerlach device

4:03 PM
@ACuriousMind Isn't it supposed to be equivalent, to some degree?
Although I guess it is only equivalent "In a sense to be explained"
but I have seen papers claiming that it can be done better, so idk

I really struggle to see this. If the wavefunction has a discrete dof, doesn't that mean the particle itself can be in an "up" or "down" state? So there is a point in which it must "jump" from one to the other

well, suppose the wavefunctions are gaussian wavepackets which start out initially centered at the same spot
then what you'd have as your initial state is $\binom{1}{1} \psi(x,t)$
once the states move apart, you'll have the stat i wrote earlier

I guess EM for no field is easy enough to reconstruct

so when do you 'jump' from having $\binom{1}{1}$ to $\binom{1}{0},\binom{0}{1}$?

$A = 0$ so every holonomy is the trivial holonomy
Easy enough

4:08 PM
there's really no 'jump' point, there's just a smooth crossover
but you won't have a useful measurement during said crossover, because the wavepackets are still overlapping
inasmuch as there's a 'jump', it's because (for practical reasons) you prepare the system to have overlapping wavepackets and only measure once they're no longer overlapped

@Slereah well, but all holonomies being trivial just means the magnetic flux is zero everywhere, it tells you nothing about the electric field
i.e. electrostatics always has trivial holonomies everywhere, yet it is not $A=0$

@ACuriousMind But then in what sense is the holonomy of a connection equivalent to the connection?

it isn't

Hm
I guess I need to read that paper more then

and the quote you gave doesn't say it is - it just says that there is a unique connection you can construct with a given holonomy

4:14 PM
I guess maybe there is an extra element you can add to reconstruct the connection?

it doesn't say this is the only connection with that holonomy, just that it is unique (maybe "minimal") in some sense

@Semiclassical but if the wavefunction is like that, isn't the particle also in one the two states? I don't get it. You are saying that the discrete dof only exists for the wavefunction, not the particle's state?

Like how you can reconstruct the metric from the causal structure + a time function

hmm
this is where i'm getting a bit clouded myself. but i think the configuration space of the particle will still just be 3D
so no, the particle carries no spin-measurement label
only the wavefunction does

@Slereah look at it this way: holonomies only tell you what happens when you parallel transport things around loops. But that doesn't tell you whether something happens when you move things along paths that aren't loops - there is clearly more information in the connection that there is the holonomies alone

4:16 PM
Is there an equivalent of holonomies for general paths

to that I counter: aaaaah

I guess that's the connection, actually

@Slereah sure, it's just the parallel transport operator along paths
one way to define a connection, actually

yeah, that makes sense

i should again note that my presentation here is heavily influenced by the Norsen paper i linked

4:17 PM
lattice gauge theories actually think about connections that way - they don't work with a gauge field $A$ assigned values at the lattice points, they work with the "comparator" or "connector" that assigns group elements to the edges of the lattice

Bohm's own presentation when it comes to spin really does have the particle carrying an additional spin DOF iirc
but you don't need that in order to reproduce Stern-Gerlach phenomena

@Semiclassical ok.. so I guess the question becomes, how does the discrete dof of the wavefunction interact with the particle then? Because it must affect its velocity. Reading the Wikipedia page, it says the the probability current is given as $(\psi,D_k\psi)$ with $D_k=\nabla_k -iA$ and $A$ vector potential. But at this point I lost any sort of intuition

I wonder if there's a link between the holonomy/connection and the EPS construction/metric
The EPS construction is somewhat similar to that notion
You can get the Weyl connection out of it, but not the LC one

the interaction norsen uses in his paper (for a +z Stern-Gerlach device) is the 2D Hamiltonian $H=(p_z^2+p_y^2)/2m-\mu z \delta(y)\sigma^z$

and it is made from tiny loops

4:23 PM
so treating the interaction with the S-G device as being very narrow in the longitudinal coordinate
with the usual Schrodinger equation $i\hbar\partial_t \Psi(x,t)=H\Psi(x,t)$, with the proviso that it's now a spinor wavefunction
so if you follow a $\binom{1}{0} \psi(x,t)$ wavepacket through there, then this wavepacket deflects up (b/c the interaction is $-\mu z\delta(y)$, so potential energy decreases in the z-direction)
whereas a $\binom{0}{1}\psi(x,t)$ wavepacket will deflect down (b/c the interaction is now $+\mu z\delta(y)$)
all of which conforms with how you understand a Stern-Gerlach device classically: you have some intense magnetic field gradient over a small region
and that serves to move magnetic moments in different directions depending on their orientation
if you now take one one of those wavepackets and send it through a different device, the interaction will now be different. but the way it changes is just "what direction does the particle come in from" and "what direction is the magnetic field gradient"
and that's all you need to get the wavepackets to move off in different directions
a slightly annoying bit here is how to define probability current density. gotta deal with the imaginary part of $\Psi^\dagger \cdot \nabla \Psi$
which isn't exactly nice but it's what you get from the Schrodinger equation
my own gloss would be that, when you work through it, you get a perfectly coherent account of one-particle Stern-Gerlach measurements

@Semiclassical this recent thesis on this stuff looks readable

nice. and his section on spin directly cites Norsen
"Unlike standard quantum mechanics, spin is not considered as an intrinsic property of a particle, but a property of the wave function and will affect the trajectory of a particle via the guiding equation". (guidance equation is "velocity = current density / density")

4:39 PM
@ACuriousMind It's true only for affine connections, or something?

@bolbteppa one thing i definitely would point out in that paper is how it deals with relativity: namely, you have to impose some definition of simultaneity for spacelike separated events
so bye-bye relativity of simultaneity

I think it's true that if you have two connections with holonomy agreeing then the connections are gauge-equivalent.
On any bundle

Interestingly the discussion yesterday on SR pointed out how this instantaneous property of non-relativistic potentials basically is one of the main differences between Galileo and Einstein, it's basically a very bad sign they have to do this tbh

@BalarkaSen No, that's exactly what my magnetic flux/electric field argument shows
the electric field is part of the curvature, so $A=0$ and some setup with electric fields are not gauge equivalent
hm

@bolbteppa fair. for me the incompatibility with relativity of simultaneity is very hard to swallow

4:45 PM
argh, I know where my mistake is, you're right

to ape a line from math: "No one shall expel us from the paradise which Einstein has created for us"

any two electric field setups are gauge equivalent, or am I wrong?
you can just add something

I would say this could probably be avoided/dealt-with

the holonomy is exponentiated magnetic flux, so all I'm saying is essentially Dirac's argument for magnetic charge quantization

it's very hard to see how, unfortunately

4:46 PM
@BalarkaSen no, the electric field is part of the curvature tensor - so two connections with different electric field cannot be gauge equivalent as their curvatures differ

$A = 0$ forces zero curvature though

yes but no one imposed $A=0$
I was trying to setup $A=0$ as a setting with trivial holonomies and some setting with purely electric fields as something with also trivial holonomies

Bell's response, i will note, would be to jettison relativity of simultaneity

but that doesn't work because of relativity - "all holonomies" means that I also have to consider loops that don't lie in the spatial slices associated with the frame where the field is purely electric, so I still get some non-trivial holonomies there

ahhh ok
nice way of thinking about things.

4:50 PM
@Slereah Apparently, two connections with the same holonomies will indeed be gauge-equivalent, see mathoverflow.net/a/200839

That's pretty shocking thinking about it, another thing that I can see going really wrong is the 'velocity' associated to the Dirac equation and Zitterbewegung

@ACuriousMind Is electrostatic always gauge equivalent to the empty field?

i don't have much to say on that

I'm not entirely sure how that meshes with my intuition that there should be some information in the transport along paths that's not captured by loops
but that's my problem

one thing i do know is that you run into issues with the Dirac equation the moment you try to have more than one particle

4:52 PM
@Slereah No! Gauge transformations don't change gauge-invariant quantities, and the electric and magnetic fields - the curvature tensor - are gauge-invariant!

the notion of quantum equilibrium starts to look very dicey in that context

In normal QM one is free to change the interpretation of the wave function to deal with relativity, if Bohm is supposed to reproduce normal qm it will have to as well, the problem is they boxed themselves in way too deep using non-relativistic thinking and calling it a 'real' wave

the problem is that there's no such thing as "electrostatic" - when we do EM as a gauge theory we're doing it relativistically, and then it's pointless to think about a given configuration as "electrostatic" - there's other frames where it's not, and there you'll have magnetic fluxes, hence non-trivial holonomies through loops that are purely spatial in that frame

it's a $U(1)$-bundle with $(E, B)$ making only a local frame on the $U(1)$ fibers... this is the point?

my starting point that "electrostatic" configurations should have trivial holonomies was flawed

4:55 PM
@bolbteppa yeah. the sacrifices you make in order for pilot wave to make sense of NRQM, set you up very badly for relativistic QM

@BalarkaSen no, the $E,B$ are just components of the curvature tensor - $E^i = F^{0i}$ and $B^i = \epsilon^{ijk}F_{jk}$

I see

they're not "good" mathematical objects, they are particular to a choice of coordinate system
maybe that's what you mean

this is why i get a bit tired of listening to philosophers arguing about QM at times, b/c it always seems to be about NRQM
when the real challenge is relativistic QM

Well Earman does plenty of RQM stuff

4:57 PM
I'm not sure how rigid that really is, I'd say it's easy to weaken these assumptions if the basic logic of the theory actually makes sense internally (the bigger question)

Ah OK, no I just don't know enough electrodynamics so this is a good opportunity that's all. I see, so the background $U(1)$-bundle is some symmetry of the underlying physics ("rotation"), the $E$ and $B$ are part of the curvature form in some frame

as it stands, pilot wave is a perfectly cromulent interpretation of a theory no one considers foundational

(on the math side of things i think the connection is the same information as an $A_\infty$-algebra homomorphism $\Omega M \to GL(n)$... the higher info is hidden in "$A_\infty$")

Hm

@bolbteppa i mean, the usual out is to adopt stuff like time foliations etc

4:58 PM
mb I should try to compute the holonomy for the Coulomb field
Or its relativistic version, anyway

but that's not really so different from preferred reference frame

Although isn't the Coulomb field the relativistic solution already?
For a static eternal point charge

@Slereah yeah, some of them definitely work with it

@Slereah what do you mean "the holonomy"

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