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This seems to be the most interesting development in QG currently. I want to know what you think might present serious obstacles to completing the program. Where could it go wrong?
The idea is that QFT and quantum statistical mechanics (QSM) need to be given a general covariant formulation. We have to avoid the idea of "transition applitude" between "initial" and "final" states because these ideas have no gen. cov. meaning. So what now seems to be the obvious thing to do is generalize the idea of "initial and final" information to the entire boundary of the spacetime region in which the process occurs.
Developing the general boundary approach has been due largely to Robert Oeckl. It can be thought of as alternative to Dirac canonical quantization where the Hamiltonian vanishes identically and process is frozen on a fixed hypersurface slice.
There are enough different people now at work in this approach that I don't feel comfortable labeling discussion by reference to specific papers or authors. So I'm starting a new thread to address the general topic.
The idea is that QFT and quantum statistical mechanics (QSM) need to be given a general covariant formulation. We have to avoid the idea of "transition applitude" between "initial" and "final" states because these ideas have no gen. cov. meaning. So what now seems to be the obvious thing to do is generalize the idea of "initial and final" information to the entire boundary of the spacetime region in which the process occurs.
Developing the general boundary approach has been due largely to Robert Oeckl. It can be thought of as alternative to Dirac canonical quantization where the Hamiltonian vanishes identically and process is frozen on a fixed hypersurface slice.
There are enough different people now at work in this approach that I don't feel comfortable labeling discussion by reference to specific papers or authors. So I'm starting a new thread to address the general topic.