Dr Schwarzer's Annus mirabilis Year - Interview No.3
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A recent interview with Dr Schwarzer on 'Quantum-Gravity – A brief derivation'
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Not being interested in any attention these papers might generate, Dr. rer. nat. habil. N. Schwarzer (theoretical and applied physicist) rather privately shares his more innovative work amongst physicists for discussion and critique. I've managed to convince him to a series of short interviews on each of these recent papers all written this year (up to 18 already and still counting). This is paper number 3.
Troy: Norbert, I was reading through a couple of papers that you shared with me recently. The first one was on a brief derivation of quantum gravity from the Einstein field equations. You have shown a derivation beginning with David Hilbert, but you have extended it further and my question is why wasn’t this done over a hundred years ago?
Norbert: Well, the simplest answer would be, I don’t know! I’ll have a guess, maybe its even a clever one?
When David Hilbert wrote his paper, Quantum theory was not really existing, not in its formal mathematically derived way as it existed more than a decade later. You probably know the Schrödinger equation came in 1926, Dirac 1928/29 and the Hilbert paper is from 1915. So, the simple extension I did was not seemed to be of need for David Hilbert, because the equations of quantum theory did not exist. So he didn’t know what people were looking for, he didn’t know about a general theory, he was just trying to mirror or obtain Einstein’s fields equations and this he did.
Troy: So without the quantum parts already known, there was no purpose for him to go on further?
Norbert: Exactly, otherwise a genius like him, I would definitively have suspected him to be able to see the little trick that I did in order to obtain the other stuff too. With the other stuff I mean the quantum. So, in his formula, which I call for exactly this reason because it contains all, 'The World Formula’, there is everything, but he had no need to show it. He saw no need, there was no Quantum theory to combine with Einstein’s field equations.
Troy: So, from his point of view at the time, there was no problem of trying to unify quantum and relativity because quantum was not yet in the picture.
Norbert: Exactly and that is why he also rightfully named his 1915 paper the 'fundamentals of physics' and at this time he was perfectly right in choosing that title. And his equation actually is the fundamentals of physics only that it requires a little bit of tweaking or extending, not even extending, its just going a little more into detail, calculating further than Hilbert did.
Troy: So what you are saying is that there is no new physics that you had to introduce, you just had to take it a little further.
Norbert: Yes exactly, its just math.
Troy: It seems unfathomable that no one had taken this further.
Norbert: For more than one hundred years nobody has seen this, absolutely, that’s it. But I think its just happened the usual thing, people jumped the band wagon, and the more funny was quantum physics. It was more entertaining, it was weirder, it was queerer, it was more LGBT, what ever it is.
Troy: So, it was like jumping down the rabbit hole and getting stuck down there?
Norbert: Yes, apparently too many got stuck there and the others that were more interested in the General Theory of Relativity probably got stuck there. All of those who wanted to combine the thing, they got stuck in the rabbit holes they dug for themselves, like String, Brane, Loop, gravity. No one ever really went to the basics to see if somebody else, maybe Hilbert had ever done the job.
Troy: Wow! But in our previous interview, you talked about deriving Newtons gravity from the quantum side from the physics. That sounds like a cruel joke from nature that if you can do that then you can give everyone hope that gravity can come from the quantum. Is that what you are saying?
Norbert: Yeah, the gravity part, the Newton gravity part, seems to come from the quantum part of quantum gravity.
Troy: But Newton's gravity is not a relativistic gravity, right?
Norbert: No it is not.
Troy: It just seems like a trick of mother nature for another rabbit hole you get stuck in, if deriving gravity from the quantum side.
Norbert: Yes that’s strange, its simpler from there than from the Einstein field equations. The thing is, if you want to derive Newton from the Einstein field equations, you have to go via the solution of the Einstein field equations, namely the one for the central force problem, which is the Schwarzschild solution. If you go to quantum gravity you don’t need to have a special solution, you just take the general solution, the general thing and there it is. It just falls out.
Troy: You are also implying then that quantum falls out from the general solution.
Norbert: Of course, that’s the whole point. Hilbert already had it all. I didn’t do anything, if you want to give it a name then you say “Schwarzer did nothing”! He just read the Hilbert-paper properly.
Troy: Meaning?
Norbert: It means that I’m just an ordinary guy, that’s it! … one, who can read!
Troy: Who took something further that no one else thought to do?
Norbert: Obviously, but it’s no sorcery, it’s nothing special I did, I just said – in mathematical words, there is the metric, the whole hocus pocus within the Hilbert approach. Taking the metric, putting this into a Hamilton formalism, together with the Ricci scalar, which tells us something about the curvature of space and time. And all I did, I investigated the whole Hilbert approach, the whole Hilbert calculation in a situation where I just added a scalar factor to the metric, or factored it out of the metric, and then considered this factor and suddenly saw that this factor makes all the quantum stuff.
Troy: So in more laymen’s terms, what would be the paradigm shift?
Norbert: Towards, Hilbert, there is none. Towards all of the others, its gigantic. The paradigm shift is, 'quantum theory was always already residing in Hilbert’s approach to describe or to obtain Einstein’s field equations'.
Troy: So, is there anywhere I can find more information both on the mathematics and on the thinking on how this all relates? On the paradigm shift?
Norbert: In the paper! Its math. If someone is unable to read the math, I do not interpret it, interpretation comes later. It means a lot with respect to explaining and understanding the tunneling effect, understanding the colours of the wave function discussion, the quantum well, the trapping of ideas, the three generations of particles, it’s all coming in later. Right now, it’s just the amazing mathematical finding that the moment you go a little bit into detail with the metric tensor, you suddenly see that Hilbert had it all. Quantum theory and general theory of relatively, it’s just one thing, two sides of the same coin.
Troy: So final question, for people to be satisfied that it is truly the right path, what would be the other necessary theoretical derivations that would be needed to show that this really is the path to everything?
Norbert: That’s straight forward and simple. You repeat the calculations Hilbert has done! But this time you do this with a scaling factor, which is just a general function in front of the metric tensor. You do this properly; and you find all the quantum equations you are looking for together with the Einstein field equations. Then you see it is just all one thing. That is why those attempts to unify something that is already together were futile.
Troy (laughing): Yeah, you’re trying to unify something that is already unified!
Norbert (playfully): It’s like you looking for your legs everywhere in the house and suddenly you are realizing “oh, I have them with me”. These are those things underneath me that carry me through the house while looking for my legs, or they couldn’t see their legs because they have fat bellies. Or maybe they never looked down because of their own arrogance. Just to get more funding for their own String, whatever, approaches instead of truly seeking for the truth.