Speaker
Dr
Edward Anderson
(Univ. of Cambridge, UK)
Description
The problem of time is a major conceptual stumbling block in attempting to
quantize gravity. For, time is conceptually different in general relativity
and in conventional quantum theory, which are the two structures that one
would seek to combine in forming a theory of quantum gravity. I consider
the timeless records approach to this in this seminar. Records are
localized, information-containing subconfigurations of a single instant.
Records theory is the study of these and of how science (or history) is to
be abstracted from correlations between them. I critically evaluate
motivations for this approach that have previously appeared in the
literature. I provide a ground-level structure for records theory and
discuss what kind of further tools are needed, illustrated in some
classical toy models: ordinary mechanics, the 2-d dynamics of pure shapes
and (perturbations about) minisuperspace.
