Hyperbolic motion 2026-10-06
Hyperbolic motion in special relativity is rectilinear motion with constant proper acceleration. A representative positive- world line is , , with proper acceleration . This describes a hyperbola in spacetime, not a hyperbolic Kepler orbit.
Local inertial frame 2026-10-03
A local inertial frame is a coordinate frame in which, at one chosen spacetime event, the metric tensor is Minkowskian and the Levi-Civita connection vanishes. Freely falling experiments confined to a sufficiently small neighbourhood therefore obey the laws of special relativity up to tidal corrections.
Newtonian mechanics 2026-10-06
Newtonian mechanics describes motion using forces, masses and acceleration in inertial frames with absolute time. It is the low-speed limit of special relativity; for constant proper acceleration with , relativistic hyperbolic motion reduces to .
The pure state is entangled when it cannot be written as a product state , equivalently when its Schmidt rank exceeds one. Its subsystem states are the reduced density matrices
where the partial trace is characterized by for every observable .
Let Bob's measurement have Kraus operators satisfying . If Alice does not learn Bob's random outcome, her state after the measurement is
This no-communication theorem means that Bob can change Alice's conditional state after she learns his outcome, but cannot change any local outcome distribution available to her alone. Standard nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is therefore operationally compatible with the prohibition of superluminal signalling in special relativity, despite its nonlocal conditional-state updates.
An exact nondisturbing state readout would destroy this protection if it reported the globally collapsed state on an absolute-time slice. For example, Alice and Bob may share Bell states. At a prearranged time Bob encodes a bit by measuring his qubit in either the computational or Hadamard basis. The usual projection postulate assigns Alice respectively one of or one of . A device returning the exact pure state lets Alice identify which basis Bob chose without waiting for his outcome, producing a superluminal signal. Equivalently, Bob may choose whether to measure, and the device distinguishes the resulting proper pure state from the original improper maximally mixed local state.
A causal alternative is a quantum state readout device located at a spacetime point that reports the local quantum state under objective collapse: take reduced states on spacelike hypersurfaces through and let those hypersurfaces approach the past light cone of . The result includes localized collapses in and excludes spacelike-separated collapses. This assumes a fixed Minkowski spacetime, localized collapse events, ordinary local unitary dynamics between them, and outputs that may control only operations in their causal future. The postulate is logically consistent because it adds a classical record of this local state without changing the state or any standard measurement probability. It also cannot support an indirect signalling algorithm. Inductively through the algorithm's events, every readout at depends only on operations, collapses, and earlier readouts in ; any operation selected from that output lies in the readout's future light cone. Composing readouts, unitary evolutions, and measurements therefore never carries a controllable dependence outside a future light cone, so relativistic causality is preserved.
Quantum field theory Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
Quantum field theory combines special relativity with quantum theory by treating fields as operator-valued distributions and particles as field excitations.
Relativistic kinetic theory describes particles by a scalar phase-space distribution function on the future mass shell. Its Boltzmann equation uses geodesic streaming and a collision operator. Integrating its momentum moments supplies a kinetic stress-energy tensor and particle-number currents. An orthonormal tetrad makes the local momentum integrals identical in form to those of special relativity.
Spacetime Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-10-05
Spacetime combines spatial position and time into one geometric setting for physical events. In special relativity it is modeled by Minkowski spacetime; in general relativity its geometry is dynamical.