Related papers: Semiclassical Gravity and Mesoscopic Physics
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…
The major advances in physics have been through counterintuitive breakthroughs-- ideas that seemed to go against prevailing convictions. In the twentieth century the Special and General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have…
We consider the classical stochastic fluctuations of spacetime geometry induced by quantum fluctuations of massless non-conformal matter fields in the Early Universe. To this end, we supplement the stress-energy tensor of these fields with…
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…
Planck scale physics represents a future challenge, located between particle physics and general relativity. The Planck scale marks a threshold beyond which the old description of spacetime breaks down and conceptually new phenomena must…
I describe an approach which relates classical gravity to the quantum microstructure of spacetime. In this approach, the field equations arise from maximizing the density of states of the matter plus geometry. The former is identified using…
We discuss how the classical notions of time and causal structure may emerge together with quantum-mechanical probabilities from a universal quantum state. For this, the process of decoherence between semiclassical branches is important.…
Invited contribution to the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics (2nd edition), providing an overview over some main ideas and results in quantum cosmology. Key points: Canonical quantisation of homogeneous, isotropic cosmology; discussion…
It is very likely that the quantum description of spacetime is quite different from what we perceive at large scales, $l\gg (G\hbar/c^3)^{1/2}$. The long wave length description of spacetime, based on Einstein's equations, is similar to the…
A correspondence between fluctuations of non-minimally coupled scalar fields and that of an effective fluid with heat flux and anisotropic stresses, is shown. Though the correspondence between respective stress tensors of scalar fields and…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamical interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields). The unreduced interaction analysis avoiding any perturbative model gives…
Gravity is a macroscopic manifestation of a microscopic quantum theory of space-time, just as the theories of elasticity and hydrodynamics are the macroscopic manifestation of the underlying quantum theory of atoms. The connection of…
We study the solutions of the semiclassical Einstein equation in flat cosmological spacetimes driven by a massive conformally coupled scalar field. In particular, we show that it is possible to give initial conditions at finite time to get…
The state-of-the-art physics consists of two irreconcilable branches, i.e., the quantum theory and the general relativity, which work well in their own territories, independently. However, what are quantum and spacetime after all? The key…
This is an essay sketching the line of thinking which has led the present author to propose the constituent or atomic model of gravitation more than a decade ago. It turns out that viewing the problem of gravitation as a quantum many body…
We explore the symmetry reduced form of a non-perturbative solution to the constraints of quantum gravity corresponding to quantum de Sitter space. The system has a remarkably precise analogy with the non-relativistic formulation of a…
Space-time quantum contributions to the classical Einstein equations of General Relativity are determined. The theoretical background is provided by the non-perturbative theory of manifestly-covariant quantum gravity and the…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
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…
Semiclassical gravity, in which a classical spacetime is sourced by the quantum expectation value of the stress-energy tensor, is a standard framework for describing the gravitational interaction of quantum matter. In the nonrelativistic…