Current Research Programme
A substantial fraction of my time is currently devoted to writing my
book The Relational Structure of
Dynamics, General Relativity, and Gauge Theory (provisional
title, see books).
When this is completed, I plan to continue research on the topics
central to the creation of quantum gravity that the book raises:
- What is general relativity? Is it irreducibly a theory of curved four-dimensional spacetime or is it a dynamical theory of the evolution of three-dimensional geometry?
- What are the implications of the holistic relational structure of classical general relativity for the quantization of the theory?
- Shapes (local conformal geometry in three dimensions) play the dominant role in the dynamics of general relativity. The theory of shapes needs to be developed within the framework of differential geometry.
- In my The End of Time I argue that the wave function of the universe is static and that the appearance of the flow of time emerges because the wave function of the universe is concentrated on configurations of the universe that we recognize as records. Edward Anderson and I are currently trying to develop this idea and create a theory of records. If successful, this work promises to explain the origin of the arrow of time at a fundamental level.