Fra said:
IMHO, entropic arguments can be constructed even without observer independent degrees of freedom.
...
As I understand LQG, they are violating a mandatory intrinsic measurement perspective ... - because where did the observer go?
I don't like reasoning that uses an observer like the Kopenhagen interpretation b/c you run into trouble with with Wigner's friend(s). LQG (as I understand Smolin's idea) implements the holographic principle, that means you have
some fundamental degrees of freedom (SU(2) spin networks), they are inducing a holographic quantum theory on a surface (Chern-Simons gauge theory) which is what is observed in principle and from that you derive entropy and eventually force, the latter one being the new part of the story. So you replace the observer by a generic holographic argument. That's nice.
Now you can ask "why fundamental degrees of freedom?" As I said you need them simply b/c w/o them you are not able to produce entropy at all.
The next question is "why SU(2) spin networks?" That's a rather tricky question - to be honest I don't know how to motivate them w/o referring to symmetry structures of the 4-dim. manifold from which they are constructed (and which you want to derive eventually). If you want to try SU(3) spin networks, I guess the story regarding entropy would be essentially the same. The difference is of course the smooth spacetime which should emerge.
I think you should forget about the history of LQG and the construction of spin network states based on the Ashtekar / LQG approach. Starting point would simply be a spin network Hilbert space. What are the artefacts coming from GR?
- SU(2) symmetry: see above; to be explained
- Gauss constraint G: done; implemented in the phys. Hilbert space
- diffeo. / vector constraint D: the same
- Hamiltonian / scalar constraint H: ?
The Hamiltonian constraint is the only artifact knowing about the details of the Einstein-Hilbert action. So I would expect that it will emerge in some appropriate limit; higher order corrections etc. are definately allowed. Most of the results from LQG do not use H at all as it is still purely inderstood. So the whole framework is rather robsut and works w/o H or with a different H.
If this is reasoning is true the main question is:
why SU(2)?