Related papers: Background-Independence
Work in progress is described which aims to construct a background independent formulation of M theory by extending results about background independent states and observables from quantum general relativity and supergravity to string…
I consider a thought experiment measuring the decoherence for quasiclassical superpositions of gravitational field. A version of the hole argument allows to prove that a covariant (background-free) theory is completely unable to define the…
The gap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics has an important interpretive implication: the Universe must have an irreducible fundamental level, which determines the properties of matter at higher levels of organization. We…
We show that a class of topological field theories are quantum duals of the harmonic oscillator. This is demonstrated by establishing a correspondence between the creation and annihilation operators and non-local gauge invariant observables…
A recently proposed axiom system for Andr\'e's central translation structures is improved upon. First, one of its axioms turns out to be dependent (derivable from the other axioms). Without this axiom, the axiom system is indeed…
Gravitational theories with fixed background fields break diffeomorphism invariance. This breaking can be spontaneous or explicit. A brief summary of the main consequences of these types of breaking is presented.
We illustrate a physical situation in which topological symmetry, its breakdown, space-time uncertainty principle, and background independence may play an important role in constructing and understanding matrix models. First, we show that…
This is a review of James Read's insightful book, Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity. The book introduces various notions of background-independence which it then makes precise, and uses to make verdicts about…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
We study the non-linear background field redefinitions arising at the quantum level in a spontaneously broken effective gauge field theory. The non-linear field redefinitions are crucial for the symmetric (i.e. fulfilling all the relevant…
Loop quantum gravity, a non-perturbative and manifestly background free, quantum theory of gravity implies that at the kinematical level the spatial geometry is discrete in a specific sense. The spirit of background independence also…
Subobject independence as morphism co-possibility has recently been defined in [2] and studied in the context of algebraic quantum field theory. This notion of independence is handy when it comes to systems coming from physics, but when…
Non-standard topics underlying a partly original approach to gauge field theory are concisely introduced, expressing ideas that were broached in several papers and, eventually, exposed in an organized form in a recently published book. By…
In some theory development tasks, a problem is satisfactorily solved once it is shown that a theorem (conjecture) is derivable from the background theory (premises). Depending on one's motivations, the details of the derivation of the…
It is shown that polymer quantization leads to a modified uncertainty principle similar to that obtained from string theory and non-commutative geometry. When applied to quantum field theory on general background spacetimes, corrections to…
The impossibility of an indeterministic evolution for standard relativistic quantum field theories, that is, theories in which all fields satisfy the condition that the generators of spacetime translation have spectrum in the forward…
Background Independence is the modern form of the relational side of the Absolute versus Relational Debate. Difficulties with its implementation form the Problem of Time. Its 9 facets - Isham and Kucha\v{r}'s conceptual classification -…
In this article we provide a substantial discussion on the statistical concept of conditional independence, which is not routinely mentioned in most elementary statistics and mathematical statistics textbooks. Under the assumption of…
We present a framework for studying the concept of independence in a general context covering database theory, algebra and model theory as special cases. We show that well-known axioms and rules of independence for making inferences…
We study gauge theories of background fields associated to BRST quantized spinning particle models and identify background-independent algebraic structures which allow to systematically reduce the spectrum of fields and subject some of them…