Stephen Adler
Stephen Louis Adler (born 1939) is an American physicist specializing in elementary particles and field theory. In his book Quantum Theory as an Emergent Phenomenon, published 2009, Adler presented his trace dynamics, a framework in which quantum field theory emerges from a matrix theory. In this matrix theory, particles are represented by non-commuting matrices, and the matrix elements of bosonic and fermionic particles are complex numbers and Grassman numbers, respectively. Using the action principle, a Lagrangian can be constructed from the trace of a polynomial function of these matrices, leading to Hamiltonian equations of motion. The construction of a statistical mechanics of these matrix models leads, so Adler, to an “emergent effective complex quantum field theory”
