The Internal Time Formalism in Canonical Gravity

Abstract

The internal time formalism provides a relatively conservative approach to canonical quantum gravity in that one attempts to retain in the Dirac quantization of the theory both general covariance and the conventional apparatus of quantum field theory. The idea is to extract dynamical variables representing many-fingered time from the phase space of general relativity and then use them as one uses such variables in the quantization of parametrized field theories. I give a general, albeit brief, presentation of this strategy and illustrate it with a few examples.KeywordsCauchy SurfaceCauchy DataTrue DegreeClosed UniverseInertial ObserverThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.