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.
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