Related papers: Reality Conditions in Nonperturbative Quantum Cosm…
Different proposals for the wave function of the universe are analyzed, with an emphasis on various forms of the tunneling proposal. The issues discussed include the equivalence of the Lorentzian path integral and outgoing-wave proposals,…
A review of the path integral approach to quantum cosmology and its relation to canonical quantisation. The initial derivation of the Hartle-Hawking and Vilenkin wavefunctions from the Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action, and later, from the…
We study how meaningful physical predictions can arise in nonperturbative quantum gravity in a closed Lorentzian universe. In such settings, recent developments suggest that the quantum gravitational Hilbert space is one-dimensional and…
The quantum reality problem is that of finding a mathematically precise definition of a sample space of configurations of beables, events, histories, paths, or other mathematical objects, and a corresponding probability distribution, for…
Bouncing models are alternatives to inflationary cosmology that replace the initial Big-Bang singularity by a `bouncing' phase. A deeper understanding of the initial conditions of the universe, in these scenarios, requires knowledge of…
In the Hartle-Hawking ``no boundary'' approach to quantum cosmology, a real tunneling geometry is a configuration that represents a transition from a compact Riemannian spacetime to a Lorentzian universe. I complete an earlier proof that in…
Is the universe computable? If yes, is it computationally a polynomial place? In standard quantum mechanics, which permits infinite parallelism and the infinitely precise specification of states, a negative answer to both questions is not…
For many years, the most active area of quantum cosmology has been the issue of choosing boundary conditions for the wave function of a universe. Recently, loop quantum cosmology, which is obtained from loop quantum gravity, has shed new…
We review the canonical quantisation of the geometry of the spacetime in the cases of a simply and a non-simply connected manifold. In the former, we analyse the information contained in the solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and…
Quantum cosmology based on Lorentzian path integrals is a promising avenue. However, many previous works allow non-Lorentzian configurations by integrating the squared scale factor over the whole real line. Here we show that restricting the…
Proposing smooth initial conditions is one of the most important tasks in quantum cosmology. On the other hand, the low-energy effective action, appearing in the semiclassical path integral, can get nontrivial quantum corrections near…
Ambiguities arising in different approaches (canonical, quasiclassical, path integration) to quantization are discussed by an example of the mechanics of a point-like particle in the Riemannian space (the geodesic dynamics). A way to select…
One of the main interest in quantum cosmology is to determine boundary conditions for the wave function of the universe which can predict observational data of our universe. For this purpose, we solve the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a…
We define the idea of {\it real path quantum theory}, a realist generalisation of quantum theory in which it is postulated that the configuration space path actually followed by a closed quantum system is probabilistically chosen. This is…
For various theories, in particular gauge field theories, the algebraic form of the Hamiltonian simplifies considerably if one writes it in terms of certain complex variables. Also general relativity when written in the new canonical…
We address an apparent conflict between the traditional canonical quantization framework of quantum theory and the spatially restricted quantum dynamics, when the translation invariance of the otherwise free quantum system is broken by…
We study homogeneous cosmological models in formulations of general relativity with cosmological constant based on a (complexified) connection rather than a spacetime metric, in particular in a first order theory obtained by integrating out…
The alternative dynamics of loop quantum cosmology is examined by the path integral formulation. We consider the spatially flat FRW models with a massless scalar field, where the alternative quantization inherit more features from full loop…
We derive the first order canonical formulation of cosmological perturbation theory in a Universe filled by a few scalar fields. This theory is quantized via well-defined Hamiltonian path integral. The propagator which describes the…
Complex metrics are a double-edged sword: they allow one to replace singular spacetimes, such as those containing a big bang, with regular metrics, yet they can also describe unphysical solutions in which quantum transitions may be more…