Related papers: Background freedom leads to many-worlds with local…
We show that the quantum wavefunctional can be seen as a set of classical fields on the 3D space aggregated by a measure. We obtain a complete description of the wavefunctional in terms of classical local beables. With this correspondence,…
Attempts to derive the Born rule, either in the Many Worlds or Copenhagen interpretation, are unsatisfactory for systems with only a finite number of degrees of freedom. In the case of Many Worlds this is a serious problem, since its goal…
Emergence of the classical world from the quantum substrate of our Universe is a long-standing conundrum. I describe three insights into the transition from quantum to classical that are based on the recognition of the role of the…
It is emphasized that a many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory exists only to the extent that the associated basis problem is solved. The core basis problem is that the robust enduring states specified by environmental decoherence…
Background independence is often emphasized as an important property of a quantum theory of gravity that takes seriously the geometrical nature of general relativity. In a background-independent formulation, quantum gravity should determine…
The origin of cosmic structure is widely regarded as quantum, yet the Universe today appears classical. Standard lore attributes this to a "quantum-to-classical" transition on super-horizon scales during inflation. Gravity plays a central…
Quantum states of gravitational source masses can lead to experimental outcomes that are inconsistent with the predictions of a purely classical field theory of gravity. Environmental decoherence places strict boundary conditions to the…
One of the many conceptual difficulties in the development of quantum gravity is the role of a background geometry for the structure of quantum field theory. To some extent the problem can be solved by the principle of local covariance. The…
This paper concerns what Background Independence itself is (as opposed to some particular physical theory that is background independent). The notions presented mostly arose from a layer-by-layer analysis of the facets of the Problem of…
We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function branching via…
Any canonical quantum theory can be understood to arise from the compatibility of the statistical geometry of distinguishable observations with the canonical Poisson structure of Hamiltonian dynamics. This geometric perspective offers a…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
Various physical effects resulting from decoherence are discussed in the algebraic framework. In particular, it is shown that the environment may induce not only classical properties like superselection rules, pointer states or even…
The paper explains why the de Broglie-Bohm theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the macroscopic classical limit. The quantum-to-classical transition is based on three steps: (i) interaction with the environment produces effectively…
The measurement problem is the issue of explaining how the objective classical world emerges from a quantum one. Here we take a different approach. We assume that there is an objective classical system, and then ask that the standard rules…
I provide a simple derivation of the Born rule as giving a classical probability, that is, the ratio of the measure of favorable states of the system to the measure of its total possible states. In classical systems, the probability is due…
We introduce a new model of background independent physics in which the degrees of freedom live on a complete graph and the physics is invariant under the permutations of all the points. We argue that the model has a low energy phase in…
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…
In this note, we describe how the study of backgrounds for general quantum systems can be formulated in terms of the representation theory of abstract $C^*$ algebras. We illustrate our general framework through two example systems:…
The mechanism of the transition of a dynamical system from quantum to classical mechanics is one of the remaining challenges of quantum theory. Currently, it is considered to occur via decoherence caused by entanglement and/or stochastic…