On The Mathematical Aspect Of Compatibility

Of Quantum Mechanics And General Relativity

ISHAN VATSA
December 2022

1 what has been done so far- a brief comment

Since the early parts of the 20th century, especially after the wide appreciation
and popularization of Quantum Electrodynamics[4], specifically saying after es-
tablishing the somewhat perfect quantization of electromagnetic field in the flat
space-time [2] , physicists worldwide resorted to the next most (apparently) nat-
ural generalization of the theory to a curved space-time. Since then there have
been many (some very radical to mention string theories) attempts by theoret-
ical physicist and mathematicians. But we can say (safely) that none of them
have been successful to the extent that we can say that they are our aces.
Hence its again safe to say the search is still on.

2 The mathematical breakdown and analysis of

the situation
It’s known that the mathematical structure of general relativity[5] is that of a
mathematician calls a manifold and with two special properties that shall be of
concern to us called paracompact and Hausdorff.[3]
Now keeping these things in mind lets try to construct a thought experiment, in
which we allow a particle, say an electron or maybe any other of significant de-
Brogile wavelength. Then keeping things simple for the time and not worrying
about minute details let us say that the particle is localized to a certain open
subset of the manifold, now by the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics,
or so to say Hisenberg’s Uncertainity relation in particular, we cannot be com-
pletely deterministic by saying the position and velocity of the particle, but we
know that the particle is somewhere among infinitely many points in the given
open subset. But now each point is given a local flat (euclidean) coordinates
by homeomorphisms[1] from each different point on the open subset to different
euclidean coordinates. This due to the fact that the space is Hausdorff.
This situation show how the things become mathematically impossible to han-
dle from now on and of course it shows that it is pointless to follow this path.
The obvious question from a non-mathematical person would be to allow the

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manifold to not be Hausdorff,but it is checked by the mathematicians that this
cannot be done as the uniqueness of limits in a non-Hausdorff space cannot be
proved and thus we cannot do calculus on the manifold.

3 What is Causing the incompatibility

we can clearly see that there is something wrong with the probabilistic formula-
tion of Quantum Mechanics, more than that what is more clear from the above
discussion(or thought experiment) is that General relativity can only be done in
manifold (with varying coordinate chats) and hence to ensure the mathematical
compatibility of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, it is clear that
one has to ensure the mathematical compatibility of Quantum Mechanics with
curved space-time and not that of General Relativity with flat space-time, the
latter one being a mathematical impossibility.

3.0.1 Possible Approaches to Reformulate Quantum Mechanics

Assuming that the description of space-time is correct according to General
Relativity. We consider the following philosophy of thought The clue lies in
the fact that the uncertinity principle, the foundation of quantum mechanics
is a relation that can only be formulated with respect to a coordinate system
and thus If we consider an electron on a manifold M then its position on the
manifold can be different each time we choose a different open set and set up
an homeomorphism with the local euclidean coordinate system.
Thus the fact that the position of the electron is uncertain to us is solely due
to the effect of gravity(space-time) on it. However for macroscopic bodies the
neighbourhood is large enough,so the coordinates in different coordinate systems
are roughly the same. This describes the significance of gravity on quantum par-
ticles
All it requires to us is to prove a theorem that shows this equivalence in gener-
ality.

References
[1] Ralph Abraham. Serge lang, introduction to differentiable manifolds. Bul-
letin of the American Mathematical Society, 70(2):225–227, 1964.

[2] Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. The quantum theory of the electron. Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a
Mathematical and Physical Character, 117(778):610–624, 1928.
[3] Charles Nash and Siddhartha Sen. Topology and geometry for physicists.
Elsevier, 1988.
[4] Julian Schwinger. Selected papers on quantum electrodynamics. Courier
Corporation, 1958.

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Figure 1: Caption

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[5] Kip S Thorne, Charles W Misner, and John Archibald Wheeler. Gravitation.
Freeman San Francisco, CA, 2000.