Stochastic Mechanics Without Ad Hoc Quantization: Theory And Applications To Semiclassical Gravity

Abstract

Stochastic mechanics (SM), as proposed by Edward Nelson and others in the 20th century, aims to reconstruct quantum mechanics (QM) from a more fundamental theory of classical point particles interacting with a classical-like ether, where said interaction causes the particles to undergo a diffusion process that conserves their average total energy. However, Timothy Wallstrom and others have emphasized that SM runs into the problem that it cannot recover the Schroedinger equation of QM unless an ad hoc quantization condition is assumed. In this thesis, I reformulate SM so that the quantization condition arises as a natural consequence of the classical point particles interacting with the classical-like ether. This is done by combining SM with a proposal by Louis de Broglie and David Bohm, in which an elementary particle in its rest frame is viewed as a localized periodic phenomenon of fixed frequency, from which it follows that the phase of the periodic phenomenon in the lab frame satisfies a relation that's equivalent to the quantization condition. In doing so, I argue that SM can once again be regarded as a viable approach to reconstructing QM. In addition, I show that SM yields novel and empirically viable models of semiclassical Newtonian gravity and electrodynamics, simply by incorporating classical Newtonian gravitational and electrostatic interactions between the particles. I also show how the Schroedinger-Newton equation and the Schroedinger-Coulomb equation arise as mean-field approximations from within these SM models of semiclassical Newtonian gravity and electrodynamics, and how classical Newtonian gravity can be recovered from an appropriate center-of-mass description of many interacting SM particles. Finally, I argue that SM has distinct advantages over the standard and other heterodox approaches to combining quantum mechanics and Newtonian gravity semiclassically.