The meaning of time in curved space quantization

[luxxio]

in diffeomorphism invariant theory, which is the meaning of the time in quantization?
or in other words which is the right time for quantization?

 

[marcus]

in diffeomorphism invariant theory, which is the meaning of the time in quantization?
or in other words which is the right time for quantization?

Rovelli's position on this is summarized in his recent essay on time.
http://fqxi.org//data/essay-contest-files/Rovelli_Time.pdf

The winners of the time essay contest should be announced within a week or ten days, I'd say.

I think the gist of Rovelli's essay is that in a diffeo invariant theory there is no preferred or absolute time---there are only various imperfect observables which you can use as clocks. These correspond to natural processes---to real devices of one sort or another. If you choose one of them to serve as your clock, then what you can predict are the correlations between the clock and other observables.

There's more to the essay, but that's it for starters.