Determinism and Dissipation in Quantum Gravity, Erice lecture

Abstract

Without invalidating quantum mechanics as a principle underlying the dynamics of a fundamental theory, it is possible to ask for even more basic dynamical laws that may yield quantum mechanics as the machinery needed for its statistical analysis. In conventional systems such as the Standard Model for quarks and leptons, this would lead to hidden variable theories, which are known to be plagued by problems such as non-locality. But Planck scale physics is so different from field theories in some flat background space-time that here the converse may be the case: we speculate that causality and locality can only be restored by postulating a deterministic underlying theory. A price to be paid may be that the underlying theory exhibits dissipation of information.