Related papers: No alternative to proliferation
If the history of science has taught us anything, it's that persistence and creativity makes the once impossible possible. It has long been thought experimental tests of quantum gravity are impossible. But during the last decade, several…
The quantization of gravity offers a solution to the presence of singularities in cosmology. Infinities are removed because of the existence of finite quanta of spacetime. This is one of the most important prediction of Loop Quantum…
When gravity is sourced by a quantum system, there is tension between its role as the mediator of a fundamental interaction, which is expected to acquire nonclassical features, and its role in determining the properties of spacetime, which…
Whether gravity is quantized remains an open question. To shed light on this problem, various Gedankenexperiments have been proposed. One popular example is an interference experiment with a massive system that interacts gravitationally…
Quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity are presently not compatible. A particular question is whether gravity causes decoherence - an unavoidable source of noise. Several models for gravitational decoherence have been proposed, not all…
After a long technical and consequently philosophical disgression about the necessity of the construction presented in this book, a logically consistent and precise theory of quantum gravity is presented. The construction of this theory…
Cosmological perturbation theory is a key tool to study the universe. The linear or first order theory is well understood, however, developing and applying the theory beyond linear order is at the cutting edge of current research in…
We argue that the main reason of crisis in quantum theory is that nature, which is fundamentally discrete and even finite, is described by classical mathematics involving the notions of infinitely small, continuity etc. Moreover, since…
When a mountaineer is ascending one of the great peaks of the Himalayas she knows that an entirely new vista awaits her at the top, whose ramifications will be known only after she gets there. Her immediate goal though, is to tackle the…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
This is a pedagogical introduction to the treatment of quantum general relativity as an effective field theory. It starts with an overview of the methods of effective field theory and includes an explicit example. Quantum general relativity…
Although there is general agreement that a removal of classical gravitational singularities is not only a crucial conceptual test of any approach to quantum gravity but also a prerequisite for any fundamental theory, the precise criteria…
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
In the area of the foundations of quantum mechanics a true industry appears to have developed in the last decades, with the aim of proving as many results as possible concerning what there cannot be in the quantum realm. In principle, the…
Numerous approaches to a quantum theory of gravity posit fundamental ontologies that exclude spacetime, either partially or wholly. This situation raises deep questions about how such theories could relate to the empirical realm, since…
Probability theory as a physical theory is, in a sense, the most general physics theory available, more encompassing than relativity theory and quantum mechanics, which comply with probability theory. Taking this simple fact seriously, I…
It is argued that the traditional "realist" methodology of physics, according to which human concepts, laws and theories can grasp the essence of reality, is incompatible with the most fruitful interpretation of quantum formalism. The proof…