Related papers: Topology change in classical and quantum gravity
Topology change is considered to be a necessary feature of quantum gravity by some authors, and impossible by others. One of the main arguments against it is that spacetimes with changing spatial topology have bad causal properties. Borde…
This thesis studies modified theories of gravity from a geometric viewpoint. We review the motivations for considering alternatives to General Relativity and cover the mathematical foundations of gravitational theories in Riemannian and…
We discuss unimodular gravity at a classical level, and in terms of its extension into the UV through an appropriate path integral representation. Classically, unimodular gravity is simply a gauge fixed version of General Relativity (GR),…
The Lorentzian metric structure used in any field theory allows one to implement the relativistic notion of causality and to define a notion of time dimension. This article investigates the possibility that at the microscopic level the…
The paper concerns the fictitious entanglement of the so-called ``singularities'' in problems, pertaining to quantum gravity, due, in point of fact, to the way we try to employ, in that context, differential geometry, the latter being…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
This is a review of the aspirations and disappointments of the canonical quantization of geometry. I compare the two chief ways of looking at canonical gravity, geometrodynamics and connection dynamics. I capture as much of the classical…
Topological gravity is the reduction of Einstein's theory to spacetimes with vanishing curvature, but with global degrees of freedom related to the topology of the universe. We present an exact Hamiltonian lattice theory for topological…
We show that many Lorentzian manifolds of dimension >2 do not admit a spacelike codimension-one foliation, and that almost every manifold of dimension >2 which admits a Lorentzian metric at all admits one which satisfies the dominant energy…
The action in general relativity (GR), which is an integral over the manifold plus an integral over the boundary, is a global object and is only well defined when the topology is fixed. Therefore, to use the action in GR and in most…
Just as for non-abelian gauge theories at strong coupling, discrete lattice methods are a natural tool in the study of non-perturbative quantum gravity. They have to reflect the fact that the geometric degrees of freedom are dynamical, and…
The gravity is classically formulated as the geometric curvature of the space-time in general relativity which is completely different from the other well-known physical forces. Since seeking a quantum framework for the gravity is a great…
We highlight three conflicts between quantum theory and classical general relativity, which make it implausible that a quantum theory of gravity can be arrived at by quantising classical gravity. These conflicts are: quantum nonlocality and…
It is argued that quantum gravity has an interpretation as a topological field theory provided a certain constraint from the path intergral measure is respected. The constraint forces us to couple gauge and matter fields to gravity for…
One of the hardest problems to tackle in the dynamics of canonical approaches to quantum gravity is that of the Hamiltonian constraint. We investigate said problem in the context of formal geometric quantization. We study the implications…
We discuss a new approach to the problem of quantum gravity in which the quantum mechanical structures that are traditionally fixed, such as the Fubini-Study metric in the Hilbert space of states, become dynamical and so implement the idea…
In seeking to arrive at a theory of ``quantum gravity'', one faces several choices among alternative approaches. I list some of these ``forks in the road'' and offer reasons for taking one alternative over the other. In particular, I…
A description of the canonical formulation of lineal gravity minimally coupled to N point particles in a circular topology is given. The Hamiltonian is found to be equal to the time-rate of change of the extrinsic curvature multiplied by…
The Lorentzian Hamiltonian constraint is solved for isotropic loop quantum cosmology coupled to a massless scalar field. As in the Euclidean case, the discreteness of quantum geometry removes the classical singularity from the quantum…
We study how meaningful physical predictions can arise in nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe. In such settings, recent developments suggest that the quantum gravitational Hilbert space is one-dimensional and…