Reflections on the Spatiotemporal Aspects of the Quantum World
Abstract
The proper resolution of the so-called measurement problem requires a "top-down" conception of the quantum world that is opposed to the usual "bottom-up" conception, which builds on an intrinsically and maximally differentiated manifold. The key to that problem is that the fuzziness of a variable can manifest itself only to the extent that less fuzzy variables exist. Inasmuch as there is nothing less fuzzy than the metric, this argues against a quantum-gravity phenomenology and suggests that a quantum theory of gravity is something of a contradiction in terms - a theory that would make it possible to investigate the physics on scales that do not exist, or to study the physical consequences of a fuzziness that has no physical consequences, other than providing a natural cutoff for the quantum field theories of particle physics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0205058,
title = {Reflections on the Spatiotemporal Aspects of the Quantum World},
author = {Ulrich Mohrhoff},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0205058},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
Invited talk at the First Meeting on the Interface of Gravitational and Quantum Realms held at IUCAA, Pune (India), December 17--21, 2001. To appear in Mod. Phys. Lett. A. 17 pages. LaTeX2e