Reflections on the Spatiotemporal Aspects of the Quantum World

Abstract

The proper resolution of the so-called measurement problem requires a "top-down" conception of the quantum world that is opposed to the usual "bottom-up" conception, which builds on an intrinsically and maximally differentiated manifold. The key to that problem is that the fuzziness of a variable can manifest itself only to the extent that less fuzzy variables exist. Inasmuch as there is nothing less fuzzy than the metric, this argues against a quantum-gravity phenomenology and suggests that a quantum theory of gravity is something of a contradiction in terms - a theory that would make it possible to investigate the physics on scales that do not exist, or to study the physical consequences of a fuzziness that has no physical consequences, other than providing a natural cutoff for the quantum field theories of particle physics.