Wilsonian viewpoint and wave function reality

[Ilja]

I am trying to follow (heuristically) your second more general paper on GLET. For what it's worth the exercise has helped me imagine what Smolin means when he talks about "Pure Relationism" in his recent book. As you may know he's is all over absolute time in that and he talks about Shape Dynamics and Causal Sets as relevant theories. Do you see them as such?

No. I have an argument why I think that a purely relational, diff-invariant theory cannot be quantized. http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1408 It is essentially that without a background one cannot recover the Newtonian limit (in the sense of Newtonian quantum gravity). For a simple experiment, easy to describe in Newtonian quantum gravity, one cannot compute a reasonable prediction in the GR case because one would need some information what it means for a particle being at the same position on different GR solutions.

Heuristically, to me at least, your Ether seems like a Causal Set or LQG tetrahedral "foam" (or whatever quantization machine) indexed by absolute time so each chunk is unique and in some sense "located". I certainly hope I'm not missing the point entirely. Smolin's got this thing about similarity-distance that seems really appealing in this context.

Indexed not only by absolute time but also by absolute space. And, therefore, in no way purely relational, but, instead, explicitly rejecting relationalism.

 

[PeterDonis]

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