Related papers: Princeton seminars on physics and philosophy
We present a bird's-eye survey on the development of fundamental ideas of quantum gravity, placing emphasis on perturbative approaches, string theory, loop quantum gravity, and black hole thermodynamics. The early ideas at the dawn of…
Quantum gravity has become a fertile interface between gravitational physics and quantum many-body physics, with its double goal of identifying the microscopic constituents of the universe and their fundamental dynamics, and of…
In this thesis I present a short review of ideas in quantum information theory. The first chapter contains introductory material, sketching the central ideas of probability and information theory. Quantum mechanics is presented at the level…
Following a line of research that I have developed for several years, I argue that the best strategy for understanding quantum gravity is to build a picture of the physical world where the notion of time plays no role. I summarize here this…
The paper defends the thesis that it's possible to maintain some conceptual preconditions of overcoming of relativistic intentions in modern philosophy of science ("there are no any general foundations in philosophy of science"). We found…
In order to obtain a well defined quantum gravity we define the spacetime in relation to the "phenomenology" of the physical interactions; however we shall to speculate with this "in General". Besides, we comment the reasons that give to…
Over the last three years, a number of fundamental physical issues were addressed in loop quantum gravity. These include: A statistical mechanical derivation of the horizon entropy, encompassing astrophysically interesting black holes as…
The literature on quantum-gravity-inspired scenarios for the quantization of spacetime has so far focused on particle-physics-like studies. This is partly justified by the present limitations of our understanding of quantum-gravity…
A "quantum-first" approach to gravity is described, where rather than quantizing general relativity, one seeks to formulate the physics of gravity within a quantum-mechanical framework with suitably general postulates. Important guides are…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
We describe a theory amalgamating quantum theory and general relativity through the identification of a continuous 4-dimensional spacetime arena constructed from the substructures of a generalised multi-dimensional form for proper time. In…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case…
This is a redacted transcript of a course given by the author at Harvard in spring semester 2016. It contains a pedagogical overview of recent developments connecting the subjects of soft theorems, the memory effect and asymptotic…
I present a brief review on space and time in different periods of physics, and then talk on the nature of space and time from physical arguments. I discuss the ways to test such a new perspective on space and time through searching for…
Various contenders for a complete theory of quantum gravity are at odds with each other. This is in particular seen in the ways they relate to information and black holes, and how to effectively treat quantization of the background…
These lectures present a general critical assessment of various frameworks for quantum gravity, with particular emphasis on string theory. The topics discussed cover field-theoretical approaches to quantum gravity, anomalies, bosonic and…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
These are some thoughts contained in a letter to colleagues, about the close relation between gravity and quantum mechanics, and also about the possibility of seeing quantum gravity in a lab equipped with quantum computers. I expect this…
The aim of this review is to provide a detailed account of the physical content emerging from this story of the canonical approach to Quantum Gravity. All the crucial steps in our presentation have a pedagogical character, providing the…