  There ought to exist a description of quantum field theory which does not
depend on an external classical time. To achieve this goal, in a recent paper
we have proposed a non-commutative special relativity in which space-time and
matter degrees of freedom are treated as classical matrices with arbitrary
commutation relations, and a space-time line element is defined using a trace.
In the present paper, following the theory of Trace Dynamics, we construct a
statistical thermodynamics for the non-commutative special relativity, and show
that one arrives at a generalized quantum dynamics in which space and time are
non-classical and have an operator status. In a future work, we will show how
standard quantum theory on a classical space-time background is recovered from
here.
