Cohomology
and quanta.
Quantum Observability
To any concept of "traditional" Differential Mathematics -
like vector fields, differential forms, etc. - it can be
associated in a natural way a cohomological theory called
C-Spectral Sequence. Elements from the first term of such a
spectral sequence are the analogues in Secondary Calculus
of the original objects. In other words, secondary vector
fields, secondary differential forms, etc. are elements
from the first term of the C-Spectral Sequence of a
diffiety. Therefore the solution of the secondarization
problem for a concept of Primary Calculus amounts to the
construction of the corresponding C-Spectral Sequence after
which one must face the technical problem of describing its
first term.
Due to what has been said all the subjects of
Secondary Calculus over a Diffiety can be expressed in
terms of the corresponding C-Spectral Sequences.
Thus the associated with it theory of Spectral Sequences
and the whole Homological Algebra become an indispensable
tool for the modern geometrical theory of the non-linear
PDEs. A priori, all of this would have been
impossible to be foreseen.
Since the objects of Secondary Calculus are cohomology
classes of various differential complexes on diffieties,
the identification of the Secondary Calculus with the
"Quantum" Calculus means that the mathematical
formalism which describes the quantum phenomena posses an
essentially homological nature and that the
characteristic quantum features - like the
non-commutativity - are just aspects of such a nature.
Moreover this means that all the quantum quantities have a
cohomological nature and so has the quantum observability
mechanism. It can be said that this mechanism is analogous
to the "observation" mechanism for smooth manifold
performed by means of the characteristic classes.
Both theories of Homology and Quantum Mechanics - the two
most important new theories of Mathematics and Physics from
the last century - were born nearly in the same time about
the thirties. It is natural that in that epoch - and also
later - it was not possible to suspect the existence of any
link between them. The most adapted tool for describing
quantum phenomena which could be found in the Mathematics
of those years was the theory of self-adjoint operators in
Hilbert spaces. Such a choice was passively
accepted by the physicians' community due to the
seductiveness of the emerging Functional
Analysis and the authority of John von
Neumann the author of the idea. Yet the theoretical scheme
built on Hilbert spaces is not localizable and is also very
poor. Once Dirac happened to notice that the physically
essential interactions in Fields Theory are so violent that
they throw the state vector away from the Hilbert space in
the shortest possible time.
Failures were also many attempts during the forties to find
a analogous of the Schrodinger Equation in Fields Theory by
replacing differential derivatives by the functional ones.
Actually these were the first attempts to write secondary
differential equations in Quantum Fields Theory. But the
brutal replacement of the partial derivative by the
functional ones could not take into account the
deep cohomological nature of the quantities and operators
of Secondary Calculus. And this was the main reason
for its failure. Only now it has become more clear
that the discovery of the cohomological methods is nothing
but the discovery of the "quantum" description in
Mathematics.