English

Philosophical Foundations of Loop Quantum Gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2022-11-29 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory History and Philosophy of Physics

Abstract

Understanding the quantum aspects of gravity is not only a matter of equations and experiments. Gravity is intimately connected with the structure of space and time, and understanding quantum gravity requires us to find a conceptual structure appropriate to make sense of the quantum aspects of space and time. In the course of the last decades, an extensive discussion on this problem has led to a clear conceptual picture, that provides a coherent conceptual foundation of today's Loop Quantum Gravity. We review this foundation, addressing issues such as the sense in which space and time are emergent, the notion of locality, the role of truncation that enables physical computations on finite graphs, the problem of time, and the characterization of the observable quantities in quantum gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.06718,
  title  = {Philosophical Foundations of Loop Quantum Gravity},
  author = {Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.06718},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

This is a preprint of the chapter: "Philosophical Foundations of Loop Quantum Gravity", to appear in the "Handbook of Quantum Gravity", edited by Cosimo Bambi, Leonardo Modesto and Ilya Shapiro, 2023, Springer, reproduced with permission of Springer. 24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:44:02.947Z