Academic Research

I am a Principal Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I received my Doctorate in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 2007. My academic research focuses primarily on the foundations of quantum theory and on quantum gravity.

Curriculum Vitae

Email at andert at gatech dot edu.

Research

My research explores the possibility of the existence of a 5th non-compactified dimension.

My approach is to utilize concepts from classical statistical mechanics and bring them over to quantum field theory. While this approach is encompassed by the path integral approach to quantum field theory, it fails to make the leap from statistics to classical dynamics that statistical mechanics does. The implications of making such a leap are several:

  • Implies that there is a 5th dimension that acts in the same way that time does for classical statistical mechanics.
  • Suggests that there is such a thing as a non-equilibrium version of quantum outcomes which may have testable implications.
  • Indicates a need to incorporate the 5th dimension into a 5-D classical general relativistic manifold which has testable implications for cosmology.
  • Indicates that quantum weirdness such as delocalization, entanglement, and observer dependent measurement have interpretations as flows of 4-D manifolds in a fifth dimension.
  • Suggests that virtual particles and vacuum loops have classically deterministic interpretations within a 5-D statistical theory as correlations between classical field excitations.

My goal is to show that 4-D quantum phenomena are 5-D classical phenomena that exist within a chaotic gravitational manifold. This means that gravity quantizes all other fields as well as itself.

Benefits

The benefits of this approach are several:

  • Explains quantum weirdness (delocalization, entanglement, virtual particles, etc.) as classical wave phenomenon in 5-D.
  • Does away with all other “interpretations” of quantum measurement in favor of 5-D classical evolution.
  • Creates a completely deterministic description of the universe but explains the randomness of quantum phenomena.
  • Generates potentially testable predictions at the cosmological scale.
  • Is a quantum theory of gravity that may be renormalizable (it is not stochastic but asymptotic).

My research is currently purely analytical. I hope to do numerical simulations at some point in the future.

The background needed to do this kind of work includes stochastic and chaotic quantization, the ADM Hamiltonian formalism of general relativity, renormalization scaling analysis, classical perturbation theory, Kaluza-Klein theory, statistical mechanics, as well as mixing theory. Also, of course, you need standard field theory, classical and quantum.

Latest Papers