Related papers: Spacetime foam: a review
With the decline of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the recent experiments indicating that quantum mechanics does actually embody 'objective reality', one might ask if a 'mechanical', conceptual model for quantum…
Quantum fluctuations of the vacuum stress-energy tensor are highly non-Gaussian, and can have unexpectedly large effects on spacetime geometry. In this paper, we study a two-dimensional dilaton gravity model coupled to a conformal field, in…
Quantum fields possess zero-point or vacuum fluctuations which induce mechanical effects, namely generalised Casimir forces, on any scatterer. Symmetries of vacuum therefore raise fundamental questions when confronted with the principle of…
Much of twentieth century physics, whether it be Classical or Quantum, has been based on the concept of spacetime as a differentiable manifold. While this work has culminated in the standard model, it is now generally accepted that in the…
The description of spacetime is an fundamental problem of cosmology. We explain why the current assignments of spacetime geometries for $\Omega_k$ of the Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model are probably incorrect and…
The spin foam framework provides a way to define the dynamics of canonical loop quantum gravity in a spacetime covariant way, by using a path integral over histories of quantum states which can be interpreted as `quantum space-times'. This…
We show that (in contrast to a rather common opinion) QM is not a complete theory. This is a statistical approximation of classical statistical mechanics on the {\it infinite dimensional phase space.} Such an approximation is based on the…
This paper deals with a study of the effects that spherically symmetric first-order metric perturbations and vacuum quantum fluctuations have on the stability of the multiply connected de Sitter spacetime recently proposed by Gott and Li.…
A model of space-time foam, made by $N$ wormholes is considered. The Casimir energy leading to such a model is computed by means of the phase shift method which is in agreement with the variational approach used in Refs.[9-14]. The…
In the first part of this work we discuss possible effects of stochastic space-time foam configurations of quantum gravity on the propagation of ``flavoured'' (Klein-Gordon and Dirac) neutral particles, such as neutral mesons and neutrinos.…
We present some modern theories on the structure of spacetime that can be classified as relational theories in the direction of Leibniz's ontology. In order to analyze the nature of spacetime we consider three levels of knowledge…
We provide a discussion of some main ideas in our project about the physical foundation of the time concept in cosmology. It is standard to point to the Planck scale (located at $\sim 10^{-43}$ seconds after a fictitious "Big Bang" point)…
One important global topological property of a spacetime manifold is orientability. It is widely believed that spatial orientability can only be tested by global journeys around the Universe to check for orientation-reversing closed paths.…
Starting from topological quantum field theory, we derive space-time uncertainty relation with respect to the time interval and the spatial length proposed by Yoneya through breakdown of topological symmetry in the large N matrix model.…
Spacetime, understood as a globally hyperbolic manifold, may be characterized by spectral data using a 3+1 splitting into space and time, a description of space by spectral triples and by employing causal relationships, as proposed earlier.…
On the base of years of experience of working on the problem of the physical foundation of quantum mechanics the author offers principles of solving it. Under certain pressure of mathematical formalism there has raised a hypothesis of…
In the last decade, progress on quantization of homogeneous cosmological spacetimes using techniques of loop quantum gravity has led to insights on various fundamental questions and has opened new avenues to explore Planck scale physics.…
One of the most common expectations of a quantum theory of gravity is that space-time is uncertain or fluctuating at microscopic scales, making it a stochastic medium for particle propagation. Particles traversing this space-time may…
There are not many tools to quantitatively monitor the emergence of classical geometric features from a quantum spacetime, whose microscopic structure may be a highly quantum-fluctuating "spacetime foam". To improve this situation, we…
The recent paper gr-qc/9909017 criticizes the limit on the measurability of distances that was derived by Salecker and Wigner in the 1950s. If justified, this criticism would have important implications for all the recent studies that have…