Related papers: Unification per the Relational Blockworld
Two of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics are (1) what gives rise to the arrow of time and (2) what the ontology of quantum mechanics is. I propose a unified 'Humean' solution to the two problems. Humeanism allows us…
A realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is proposed - Contextual Quantum Realism (CQR) - according to which there exists a categorical distinction between the ideal (theory, observation instrument) and the real (quantum physical…
Closed timelike curves are among the most controversial features of modern physics. As legitimate solutions to Einstein's field equations, they allow for time travel, which instinctively seems paradoxical. However, in the quantum regime…
At the heart of quantum technology development is the control of quantum systems at the level of individual quanta. Mathematically, this is realised through the study of Hamiltonians and the use of methods to solve the dynamics of quantum…
Advances in our understanding of the physical universe have impacted dramatically on how we view ourselves. Right at the core of all modern thinking about the universe is the assumption that dynamics is an elemental feature that exists…
In an open Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) space background, we study the classical and quantum cosmological models in the framework of the recently proposed nonlinear massive gravity theory. Although the constraints which are present in…
The identification of physical subsystems in quantum mechanics as compared to classical mechanics poses significant conceptual challenges, especially in the context of quantum gravity. Traditional approaches associate quantum systems with…
One of the biggest challenges to theoretical physics of our time is to find a background-independent quantum theory of gravity. Today one encounters a profusion of different attempts at quantization, but no fully accepted - or acceptable,…
We investigate the class of physical theories with the same local structure as quantum theory, but a potentially different global structure. It has previously been shown that any bipartite correlations generated by such a theory must be…
In a natural extension of the relativity principle we argue that a quantum theory of gravity involves two fundamental scales associated with both dynamical space-time as well as dynamical momentum space. This view of quantum gravity is…
On a scientific meta-level, it is discussed how an overall understanding of the physical universe can be built on the basis of well-proven theories, observations, and recent experiments. In the light of almost a century of struggle to make…
The absence of Birkhoff's theorem in effective quantum gravity models leads to a fundamental ambiguity in the vacuum sector, where a priori no unique vacuum solution exists. As a result, phenomenological investigations of the physical…
Quantum gravity (or quantum spacetime) is to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theoretical framework and presented as the most important open puzzle in fundamental physics. The development of a microscopic theory…
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. General relativity is a deterministic theory but where the causal structure is dynamic. It is reasonable to expect that quantum gravity will be a probabilistic theory…
The problem of understanding quantum mechanics is in large measure the problem of finding appropriate ways of thinking about the spatial and temporal aspects of the physical world. The standard, substantival, set-theoretic conception of…
We discuss a general setup which allows the study of the perturbation theory of an arbitrary, locally harmonic 1D quantum mechanical potential as well as its multi-variable (many-body) generalization. The latter may form a prototype for…
We compare two different approaches to the treatment of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the introduction of time in quantum cosmology. One approach is based on the gauge-fixing procedure in theories with first-class constraints, while the…
In this thesis the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation of quantum mechanics is applied to canonical quantum gravity. It is shown that, irrespective of any regularization or choice of factor ordering of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the unique…
Precanonical quantization is based on a generalization of the Hamiltonian formalism to field theory, the so-called De Donder-Weyl (DW) theory, which does not require a spacetime splitting and treats the space-time variables on an equal…
Using tangent bundle geometry we construct an equivalent reformulation of classical field theory on flat spacetimes which simultaneously encodes the perspectives of multiple observers. Its generalization to curved spacetimes realizes a new…