Related papers: Two arguments for more fundamental building blocks
I describe a constructive foundation for Quantum Mechanics, based on the discreteness of the degrees of freedom of quantum objects and on the Principle of Relativity. Taking Einstein's historical construction of Special Relativity as a…
Our collective views regarding the question "what is fundamental?" are continually evolving. These ontological shifts in what we regard as fundamental are largely driven by theoretical advances ("what can we calculate?"), and experimental…
This paper discusses several methods for describing the dynamics of open quantum systems, where the environment of the open system is infinite-dimensional. These are purifications, phase space forms, master equation and liouville equation…
In this chapter we take up the quantum Riemannian geometry of a spatial slice of spacetime. While researchers are still facing the challenge of observing quantum gravity, there is a geometrical core to loop quantum gravity that does much to…
A new idea of quantum gravity is developed based on {\it Gravitational Complementary Principle}. This principle states that gravity has dual complement features: The quantum and classical aspects of gravity are complement and absolutely…
David Finkelstein was very fond of the new information-theoretic paradigm of physics advocated by John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman. Only recently, however, the paradigm has concretely shown its full power, with the derivation of…
This paper deals with the foundations of quantum mechanics. We start by outlining the characterisation, due to Birkhoff and Von Neumann, of the logical structures of the theories of classical physics and quantum mechanics, as boolean and…
The paper firstly argues from conservation principles that, when dealing with physics aside from elementary particle interactions, the number of naturally independent quantities, and hence the minimum number of base quantities within a unit…
It is only human nature to be reluctant to accept something new and different. This feeling is exacerbated given the success of the Big Bang model. However, there are cogent reasons for considering this new model. Some of the advantages of…
It is often said that time vanishes in quantum gravity. One general approach to quantum gravity accepts this fundamental timelessness but seeks to derive time's emergence at a non-fundamental level. To better assess such approaches, I…
This paper contains a critique of the standard inflationary account of the origin of cosmological structures from quantum fluctuations in the early universe. This critique can be thought to be purely philosophical in nature, but I prefer to…
Five physical assumptions are proposed that together entail the general qualitative results, including the Born rule, of non-relativistic quantum mechanics by physical and information-theoretic reasoning alone. Two of these assumptions…
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…
We show that if one starts with a Universe with some matter and a cosmological constant, then quantum mechanics naturally induces an attractive gravitational potential and an effective Newton's coupling. Thus gravity is an emergent…
Analogs of fundamental physical phenomena can be used in two ways. One way consists in reproducing specific aspects of classical or quantum gravity, of quantum fields in curved space or of other high-energy scenarios, on lower-energy…
Quantum decision theory is introduced here, and new basis for this theory is proposed. It is first based upon the author's general arguments for the Hilbert space formalism in quantum theory, next on arguments for the Born rule, that is,…
Current physics is faced with the fundamental problem of unifying quantum theory and general relativity, which would have resulted in quantum gravity. The main effort to construct the latter has been bent on quantizing spacetime structure,…
Spacetime emergence from entanglement proposes an alternative to quantizing gravity and typically derives a notion of distance based on the amount of mutual information shared across sub-systems. Albeit promising, this program still faces…
We consider a set of macroscopic (classical) degrees of freedom coupled to an arbitrary many-particle Hamiltonian system, quantum or classical. These degrees of freedom can represent positions of objects in space, their angles, shape…
We describe a kinetic theory approach to quantum gravity -- by which we mean a theory of the microscopic structure of spacetime, not a theory obtained by quantizing general relativity. A figurative conception of this program is like…