Parallel Lives (PL) is an ontological model of nature in which quantum mechanics and special relativity are unified in a single universe with a single space-time. Point-like objects called lives are the only fundamental objects in this space-time, and they propagate at or below c, and interact with one another only locally at pointlike events in space-time, very much like classical point particles. Lives are not alive in any sense, nor do they possess consciousness or any agency to make decisions -they are simply point objects which encode memory at events in space-time. The only causes and effects in the universe occur when lives meet locally, and thus the causal structure of interaction events in space-time is Lorentz invariant. Each life traces a continuous world-line through space-time, and experiences its own relative world, fully defined by the outcomes of past events along its world-line (never superpositions), which are encoded in its external memory. A quantum field comprises a continuum of lives throughout space-time, and familiar physical systems like particles each comprise a subcontinuum of the lives of the field. Each life carries a hidden internal memory containing a local relative wavefunction, which is a local piece of a pure universal wavefunction, but it is the relative wavefunctions in the local memories throughout space-time which are physically real in PL, and not the universal wavefunction in configuration space. Furthermore, while the universal wavefunction tracks the average behavior of the lives of a system, it fails to track their individual dynamics and trajectories. There is always a preferred separable basis, and for an irreducible physical system, each orthogonal term in this basis is a different relative world -each containing some fraction of the lives of the system. The relative wavefunctions in the lives' internal memories govern which lives of different systems can meet during future local interactions, and thereby enforce entanglement correlations -including Bell inequality violations. These, and many other details, are explored here, but several aspects of this framework are not yet fleshed out, and work is ongoing.
OverviewThis model has been developed in the spirit of Einstein [1], Aharonov [2], and others, which can be loosely summarized by the sentence, "Once you can explain the workings of nature with the right physical story, the mathematical formalism will follow." I am not so presumptuous as to think that this is the right physical story, but I do believe that this model possesses a remarkable degree of elegance and simplicity, and thus warrants serious consideration. Here I attempt to present the most important parts of the story, after which I examine several specific details, examples, and questions.The guiding principle for the development of this ontology is that there should be only one space-time in the universe, in which all objects reside, and the only fundamental objects should be point-like 'lives' that move along world lines like classical point particles,...
