A New Approach to Quantising Space-Time: I. Quantising on a General Category

A new approach is suggested to the problem of quantising causal sets, or topologies, or other such models for space-time (or space). The starting point is the observation that entities of this type can be regarded as objects in a category whose arrows are structure-preserving maps. This motivates investigating the general problem of quantising a system whose `configuration space' (or history-theory analogue) can be regarded as the set of objects Ob(Q) in a category Q. In this first of a series of papers, we study this question in general and develop a scheme based on constructing an analogue of the group that is used in the canonical quantisation of a system whose configuration space is a manifold Q is isomorphic to G/H where G and H are Lie groups. In particular, we choose as the analogue of G the monoid of 'arrow fields' on Q. Physically, this means that an arrow between two objects in the category is viewed as some sort of analogue of momentum. After finding the 'category quantisation monoid', we show how suitable representations can be constructed using a bundle of Hilbert spaces over Ob(Q).

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Published 1 January 2003