Related papers: Where to Apply Relationalism
The history of general relativity suggests that in absence of experimental data, constructing a theory on philosophical first principles can lead to a very useful theory as well as to ground-breaking insights about physical reality. The two…
Group field theory posits that spacetime is emergent and is hence defined without any background notion of space or time; dynamical questions are formulated in relational terms, in particular using (scalar) matter degrees of freedom as…
Recent proposals suggested quantum clock interferometry for tests of the Einstein equivalence principle. However, atom interferometric models often include relativistic effects only in an ad hoc fashion. Here, instead, we start from the…
Understanding the causal influences that hold among parts of a system is critical both to explaining that system's natural behaviour and to controlling it through targeted interventions. In a quantum world, understanding causal relations is…
Recently\cite{BQG}, it was shown that quantum effects of matter could be identified with the conformal degree of freedom of the space-time metric. Accordingly, one can introduce quantum effects either by making a scale transformation (i.e.…
I defend algebraicism, according to which physical fields can be understood in terms of their structural relations without reference to a spacetime manifold, as a genuine relationalist view against the conventional wisdom that it is…
If Nature allowed nonlocal correlations other than those predicted by quantum mechanics, would that contradict some physical principle? Various approaches have been put forward in the past two decades in an attempt to single out quantum…
A recent analysis by Pikovski et al. [Nat. Phys. 11, 668 (2015)] has triggered interest in the question of how to include relativistic corrections in the quantum dynamics governing many-particle systems in a gravitational field. Here we…
In this paper we discuss Internal Relativity, a recent program to address the problem of quantum gravity. In our approach we change the relationship between spacetime and matter. Currently we view matter as propagating on spacetime.…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
We argue that in classical and quantum theories of gravity the configuration space and Hilbert space may not be constructible through any finite procedure. If this is the case then the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology may be a…
Relational particle mechanics are models in which there is, overall, no time, position, orientation (nor, sometimes, scale). They are useful for whole-universe modelling - the setting for quantum cosmology. This note concerns 3 particles in…
The paper reviews positive and negative time delays in various processes of classical and quantum physics. In the beginning, we demonstrate how a time-shifted response of a system to an external perturbation appears in classical mechanics…
Recent work has shown that relativistic time dilation results in correlations between a particle's internal and external degrees of freedom, leading to decoherence of the latter. In this note, we briefly summarize the results and address…
I investigate useful shape quantities for the classical and quantum mechanics of the relational quadrilateral in 2-d. This is relational in the sense that only relative times, relative ratios of separations and relative angles are…
A great effort has been devoted to formulate a classical relativistic theory of spin compatible with quantum relativistic wave equations. The main difficulty in order to connect classical and quantum theories rests in finding a parameter…
In general relativity, the picture of spacetime assigns an ideal clock to each worldline. Being ideal, gravitational effects due to these clocks are ignored and the flow of time according to one clock is not affected by the presence of…
Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…
Experiments witnessing the entanglement between two particles interacting only via the gravitational field have been proposed as a test whether gravity must be quantized. In the language of quantum information, a non-quantum gravitational…
We continue our analysis of a quantum cosmology model describing a flat Friedmann--Lema\^itre--Robertson--Walker universe filled with a (free) massless scalar field and an arbitrary perfect fluid. For positive energy density in the scalar…