Physics as Generalized Number Theory I: p-Adic Physics and Number Theoretic Universality

Abstract

Physics as a generalized number theory program involves three threads: various p-adic physics and their fusion together with real number based physics to a larger structure, the attempt to understand basic physics in terms of classical number fields (in particular, identifying associativity condition as the basic dynamical principle), and infinite primes whose construction is formally analogous to a repeated second quantization of an arithmetic quantum field theory. In this article p-adic physics and the technical problems relates to the fusion of p-adic physics and real physics to a larger structure are discussed.

The basic technical problems relate to the notion of definite integral both at space-time level, imbedding space level and the level of WCW (the "world of classical worlds"). The expressibility of WCW as a union of symmetric spaces leads to a proposal that harmonic analysis of symmetric spaces can be used to define various integrals as sums over Fourier components. This leads to the proposal the p-adic variant of symmetric space is obtained by a algebraic continuation through a common intersection of these spaces, which basically reduces to an algebraic variant of coset space involving algebraic extension of rationals by roots of unity. This brings in the notion of angle measurement resolution for given p-adic prime p. Also a proposal how one can complete the discrete version of symmetric space to a continuous p-adic versions emerges and means that each point is effectively replaced with the p-adic variant of the symmetric space identifiable as a p-adic counterpart of the real discretization volume so that a fractal p-adic variant of symmetric space results.