Related papers: Spectral Geometry and Causality
General relativity promotes space-time to a physical, dynamical object subject to equations of motion. Quantum gravity, accordingly, must provide a quantum framework for space-time, applicable on the smallest distance scales. Just like…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
Space-time symmetries and internal quantum symmetries can be placed on equal footing in a hyperspin geometry. Four-dimensional classical space-time emerges as a result of a decoherence that disentangles the quantum and the space-time…
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…
We present a spinfoam formulation of Lorentzian quantum General Relativity. The theory is based on a simple generalization of an Euclidean model defined in terms of a field theory over a group. The model is an extension of a recently…
The causality structure of two-dimensional manifolds with degenerate metrics is analysed in terms of global solutions of the massless wave equation. Certain novel features emerge. Despite the absence of a traditional Lorentzian Cauchy…
The so-called spectral dimension is a scale-dependent number associated with both geometries and field theories that has recently attracted much attention, driven largely though not exclusively by investigations of causal dynamical…
Quantum information can provide a lens for characterizing the operational implications of spacetime physics. A well-known result in this area is that quantum entanglement is degraded in the vicinity of a black hole. This result treats the…
The ideas of spacetime discreteness and causality are important in several of the popular approaches to quantum gravity. But if discreteness is accepted as an initial assumption, conflict with Lorentz invariance can be a consequence. The…
The unification of general relativity with quantum theory will also require a coming together of the two quite different mathematical languages of general relativity and quantum theory, i.e., of differential geometry and functional analysis…
The paper concerns the fictitious entanglement of the so-called ``singularities'' in problems, pertaining to quantum gravity, due, in point of fact, to the way we try to employ, in that context, differential geometry, the latter being…
Standard approaches to quantum gravity start with a pre-spacetime structure and attempt, in accordance with Bohr's correspondence principle, to recover the pseudo-Riemannian manifold in the low energy limit. These approaches assume there is…
Suppose the usual description of spacetime as a 4-dimensional manifold with a Lorentzian metric breaks down at Planck energies. Can we still construct sensible theoretical models of the universe? Are they testable? Do they lead to a…
A reflexive relation on a set can be a starting point in defining the causal structure of a spacetime in General Relativity and other relativistic theories of gravity. If we identify this relation as the relation between lightlike separated…
Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must…
In recent years several ideas for experimental searches of effects induced by quantum properties of space-time have been discussed. Some of these ideas concern the role in quantum spacetime of the ordinary Lorentz symmetry of classical flat…
To unify general relativity and quantum theory is hard in part because they are formulated in two very different mathematical languages, differential geometry and functional analysis. A natural candidate for bridging this language gap, at…
We consider functional-integral quantisation of the moduli of all quantum metrics defined as square-lengths $a$ on the edges of a Lorentzian square graph. We determine correlation functions and find a fixed relative uncertainty $\Delta…
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…
Quantum gravity was born as that branch of modern theoretical physics that tries to unify its guiding principles, i.e., quantum mechanics and general relativity. Nowadays it is providing new insight into the unification of all fundamental…