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Why Quantize Gravity (or Any Other Field for That Matter)?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Nick Huggett and
Craig Callender
Nick Huggett*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
Craig Callender
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
*
†Send requests for reprints to Nick Huggett, Department of Philosophy, MC 267, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607–7114; email: huggett@uic.edu.
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Abstract

The quantum gravity program seeks a theory that handles quantum matter fields and gravity consistently. But is such a theory really required and must it involve quantizing the gravitational field? We give reasons for a positive answer to the first question, but dispute a widespread contention that it is inconsistent for the gravitational field to be classical while matter is quantum. In particular, we show how a popular argument (Eppley and Hannah 1997) falls short of a no-go theorem, and discuss possible counterexamples. Important issues in the foundations of physics are shown to bear crucially on all these considerations.

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Footnotes

‡

Many thanks to John Baez, Jossi Berkovitz, Jeremy Butterfield, Tom Imbo, Michael Redhead, and Carlo Rovelli for discussions of these topics. The arguments of this paper are also discussed in Chapter 1 of Callender and Huggett 2001.

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