Space-time Uncertainty from Higher-dimensional Determinism (or: How Heisenberg Was Right in 4d Because Einstein Was Right in 5d)

Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation is commonly regarded as defining a level of unpredictability that is fundamentally incompatible with the deterministic laws embodied in classical field theories such as Einstein’s general relativity. We here show that this is not necessarily the case. Using 5D as an example of dimensionally-extended relativity, we employ a novel metric to derive the standard quantum rule for the action and a form of Heisenberg’s relation that applies to real and virtual particles. The philosophical implications of these technical results are somewhat profound.