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Has anyone tried to develop relativistic quantum theory along the lines of the Heisenberg picture and what's so difficult about promoting time to an operator??

pkjag
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    There is a Heisenberg formalism of QFT. But in QFT, we don't promote the coordinates, we promote the fields, so the second part of your question doesn't mesh well with the first. – ACuriousMind Jul 12 '14 at 14:13
  • I am reading Srednicki and that's how he defines a Heisenberg formalism- as promoting time to an operator – pkjag Jul 12 '14 at 14:15
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    I've never read Srednicki, but that's not what the Heisenberg picture is. – ACuriousMind Jul 12 '14 at 14:19
  • Ok maybe i misinterpreted, but what's so hard about promoting time as an operator "The many times are the problem; any monotonic function of τ is just as good a candidate as τ itself for the proper time, and this infinite redundancy of descriptions must be understood and accounted for" trying to explain that in layman's terms might help!! – pkjag Jul 12 '14 at 14:23
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    Why time is not a good operator has been already discussed here, here, here and possibly at a hundred other questions, too. – ACuriousMind Jul 12 '14 at 14:30
  • @ACuriousMind making use of the covariant quantization, time and space are treated in exactly the same way ... – Dilaton Jul 12 '14 at 19:02
  • @Dilaton: If I understand covariant quantization ala DeDonder/Weyl correctly, the parameters of the background manifold (of which time is then one), do not become operators in that approach either, but only the fields on the background manifold. So time and space are treated equally, but neither becomes an operator. – ACuriousMind Jul 12 '14 at 19:30

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