English

What is a Gravitational Path Integral? {\it or} Gravitational Path Integrals as Fluctuating Gravito-Hydrodynamics

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-01-19 v1

Abstract

We show how Gravitational Path Integral formulae for various quantities that have been computed in the literature, follow from a few coarse grained hydrodynamic assumptions about the relations between space-time geometry, entropy, and fluctuations of the modular Hamiltonian of causal diamonds. These remarks have implications for the way we think about such path integrals in relation to a more fundamental model of quantum gravity, and to questions about which space-time topologies are actually summed over in real models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.10834,
  title  = {What is a Gravitational Path Integral? {\it or} Gravitational Path Integrals as Fluctuating Gravito-Hydrodynamics},
  author = {T. Banks},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.10834},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 1 figure, LaTeX

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:06:46.477Z