Related papers: A Quantum-Gravity Perspective on Semiclassical vs.…
We give a general overview of various flavors of the equivalence principle in classical and quantum physics, with special emphasis on the so-called weak equivalence principle, and contrast its validity in mechanics versus field theory. We…
It is often argued that gravity has to be a quantum theory simply because a fundamentally semiclassical approach would necessarily be inconsistent. Here I review recent Newtonian toy models of (stochastic) semiclassical gravity. They…
One of the most important issues in quantum gravity is to identify its semi-classical regime. First the issue is to define for we mean by a semi-classical theory of quantum gravity, then we would like to use it to extract physical…
A quantitative test for the validity of the semi-classical approximation in gravity is given. The criterion proposed is that solutions to the semi-classical Einstein equations should be stable to linearized perturbations, in the sense that…
We point out a possible complementation of the basic equations of quantum mechanics in the presence of gravity. This complementation is suggested by the well-known fact that quantum mechanics can be equivalently formulated in the position…
Scale factor duality, a truncated form of time dependent T-duality, is a symmetry of string effective action in cosmological backgrounds interchanging small and large scale factors. The symmetry suggests a cosmological scenario…
What if gravity is classical? If true, a consistent co-existence of classical gravity and quantum matter requires that gravity exhibit irreducible fluctuations. These fluctuations can mediate classical correlations, but not quantum…
Gauge/gravity duality posits an equivalence between certain strongly coupled quantum field theories and theories of gravity with negative cosmological constant in a higher number of spacetime dimensions. The map between the degrees of…
In the last 20 years, loop quantum gravity, a background independent approach to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, has been widely investigated. The aim of loop quantum gravity is to construct a mathematically rigorous,…
In this essay I begin to lay out a conceptual scheme for: (i) analysing dualities as cases of theoretical equivalence; (ii) assessing when cases of theoretical equivalence are also cases of physical equivalence. The scheme is applied to…
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…
We identify a class of point-particle models that exhibit a target-space duality. This duality arises from a construction based on supersymmetric quantum mechanics with a non-vanishing central charge. Motivated by analogies to string…
One of the standard approaches of incorporating the quantum gravity (QG) effects into the semiclassical analysis is to adopt the notion of a quantum-corrected spacetime arising from the QG model. This procedure assumes that the expectation…
Duality transformations within the quantum mechanics of a finite number of degrees of freedom can be regarded as the dependence of the notion of a quantum, i.e., an elementary excitation of the vacuum, on the observer on classical phase…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture holds that in a theory of quantum gravity, any gauge force must mediate interactions stronger than gravity for some particles. This statement has surprisingly deep and extensive connections to many different…
In this paper, we present an overview of some of the existing issues of the research in quantum gravity. We also introduce the basic ideas that led Padmanabhan to consider a duality property in path integrals. Such a duality is consistent…
The old cosmological-constant (CC) problem indicates an inconsistency of the usual formulation of semiclassical gravity. The usual formulation of semiclassical gravity also seems to be inconsistent with the conventional interpretation of…
We propose a quantitative test for the validity of the semi-classical approximation in gravity, namely that the solutions to the semi-classical equations should be stable to linearized perturbations, in the sense that no gauge invariant…
It is a general belief that all fundamental interactions need to be quantized. However, all attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity presented various problems, leading to a recent active debate about how to probe its quantum nature.…
We present brief, to great extent pedagogical review on renormalization in curved space-time and of some recent results on the derivation and better understanding of quantum corrections to the action of gravity. The paper is mainly devoted…