Related papers: The Small Scale Structure of Spacetime
General relativity in three spacetime dimensions is used to explore three approaches to the ``problem of time'' in quantum gravity: the internal Schr\"odinger approach with mean extrinsic curvature as a time variable, the Wheeler-DeWitt…
The requirement that physical phenomena associated with gravitational collapse should be duly reconciled with the postulates of quantum mechanics implies that at a Planckian scale our world is not 3+1 dimensional. Rather, the observable…
The two-component formalism in quantum cosmology is revisited with a particular emphasis on the identification of time. Its relation with the appearance of imaginary eigenvalues is established. It is explicitly shown how a good choice of…
I discuss possible implications a symmetry relating gravity with antigravity might have for smoothing out of the cosmological constant puzzle. For this purpose, a very simple model with spontaneous symmetry breaking is explored, that is…
Contemporary research programs in fundamental physics appear to suggest that there could be two (physical) times---or none at all. This essay articulates these possibilities in the context of quantum gravity, and in particular of…
If the mechanism responsible for the smallness of the vacuum energy is consistent with local quantum field theory, general arguments suggest the existence of at least one unobserved scalar particle with Compton wavelength bounded from below…
An important task faced by all approaches of quantum gravity is to incorporate superpositions and quantify quantum uncertainties of spacetime causal relations. We address this task in 2D. By identifying a global $Z_2$ symmetry of 1+1D…
We canonically quantize the dynamics of the brane universe embedded into the five-dimensional Schwarzschild-anti-deSitter bulk space-time. We show that in the brane-world settings the formulation of the quantum cosmology, including the…
We argue in a model-independent way that the Hilbert space of quantum gravity is locally finite-dimensional. In other words, the density operator describing the state corresponding to a small region of space, when such a notion makes sense,…
Quantization in the minisuperspace of non minimal scalar-tensor theories leads to a partial differential equation which is non separable. Through a conformal transformation we can recast the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in an integrable form,…
In the investigation and resolution of the cosmological constant problem the inclusion of the dynamics of quantum gravity can be a crucial step. In this work we suggest that the quantum constraints in a canonical theory of gravity can…
Quantum-gravity renders the space-time dimension to depend on the size of region; it monotonically increases with the size of region and asymptotically approaches four for large distances. This effect was discovered in numerical simulations…
It is well known that in quantum gravity, the very geometry of space and time is subject to continual fluctuation. The mathematical formulation for this old theory is still lacking. This article formulates this more than forty-year-old…
We summarize and expand our investigations concerning the soft graviton effects on microscopic matter dynamics in de Sitter space. The physical couplings receive IR logarithmic corrections which are sensitive to the IR cut-off at the…
Is there a number for every bit of spacetime, or is spacetime smooth like the real line? The ultimate fate of a quantum theory of gravity might depend on it. The troublesome infinities of quantum gravity can be cured by assuming that…
The literature on quantum-gravity-inspired scenarios for the quantization of spacetime has so far focused on particle-physics-like studies. This is partly justified by the present limitations of our understanding of quantum-gravity…
We explore how quantum gravity effects, manifested through the breaking of discrete symmetry responsible for both Dark Matter and Domain Walls, can have observational effects through CMB observations and gravitational waves. To illustrate…
We propose a theory of quantum gravity which formulates the quantum theory as a nonperturbative path integral, where each spacetime history appears with a weight given by the exponentiated Einstein-Hilbert action of the corresponding causal…
The true nature of gravity is a remarkable open problem in Gravitation. Theoretical and observational motivations open the avenue of alternative theories of gravity. One possibility resorts to nonminimal couplings and non-metricity…
Flatness -- the absence of spacetime curvature -- is a well-understood property of macroscopic, classical spacetimes in general relativity. The same cannot be said about the concepts of curvature and flatness in nonperturbative quantum…