Related papers: Recent Conceptual Consequences of Loop Quantum Gra…
The concepts of space, time, and matter are of central importance in any theory of the gravitational field. Here I discuss the role that these concepts might play in quantum theories of gravity. To be concrete, I will focus on the most…
`How do our ideas about quantum mechanics affect our understanding of spacetime?' This familiar question leads to quantum gravity. The complementary question is also important: `How do our ideas about spacetime affect our understanding of…
The quantization of time-reparametrization invariant systems such as general relativity is plagued by an ambiguity relating to the role of time in the theory. If one parametrizes observables by the (unobservable) time, and then relies on…
For a 1+1 dimensional theory of gravity with torsion different approaches to the formulation of a quantum theory are presented. They are shown to lead to the same finite dimensional quantum system. Conceptual questions of quantum gravity…
Understanding the emergence of a tangible 4-dimensional space-time from a quantum theory of gravity promises to be a tremendously difficult task. This article makes the case that this task may not have to be carried. Space-time as we know…
We review aspects of loop quantum gravity in a pedagogical manner, with the aim of enabling a precise but critical assessment of its achievements so far. We emphasise that the off-shell (`strong') closure of the constraint algebra is a…
The concept of time is discussed in the context of the canonical formulation of the gravitational field. Using a hypersurface orthogonal foliation, the arbitrariness of the lapse function is eliminated and the shift vector vanishes,…
As a canonical and generally covariant gauge theory, loop quantum gravity requires special techniques to derive effective actions or equations. If the proper constructions are taken into account, the theory, in spite of considerable…
The canonical formalism of general relativity affords a particularly interesting characterisation of the infamous hole argument. It also provides a natural formalism in which to relate the hole argument to the problem of time in classical…
The concept of proper time cannot be just taken over from classical theory and applied to quantum theory. There are a number of serious ambiguities related to it. Similarly, the concept of mass has some inconsistencies attached to it. We…
The search for a consistent and empirically established quantum theory of gravity is among the biggest open problems of fundamental physics. The obstacles are of formal and of conceptual nature. Here, I address the main conceptual problems,…
Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…
In quantum gravity space and time lose their status as fundamental parts of the physical reality. However, according to Kant, space and time are the a priori conditions of our experience. Does Kantian characterization of these notions give…
This is a contribution to a book on quantum gravity and philosophy. I discuss nature and origin of the problem of quantum gravity. I examine the knowledge that may guide us in addressing this problem, and the reliability of such knowledge.…
This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.…
The fact that canonical quantum gravity does not possess a fundamental notion of time implies that the theory is unitary in a trivial sense. At the fundamental level, this trivial unitarity leaves no room for a black-hole information loss.…
This article presents an "in-a-nutshell" yet self-contained introductory review on loop quantum gravity (LQG) -- a background-independent, nonperturbative approach to a consistent quantum theory of gravity. Instead of rigorous and…
A New Mathematico-Physical and Information Theoretic Approach Examination of the available hard core information to firm up the process of unification of quantum and gravitational physics leads to the conclusion that for achieving this…
Loop quantum gravity is a mature theory. To proceed to explicit calculations in cosmology, it is necessary to make assumptions and simplifications based on the symmetries of the cosmological setting. Symmetry reduction is especially…
Eternalism, the view that what we regard locally as being located in the past, the present and the future equally exists, is the best ontological account of temporal existence in line with special and general relativity. However, special…