A Quantum Superposition Of Spacetimes Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 770):

In the Hartle–Hawking scheme, it is necessary to use Hawking’s ingenious modification of the Wick idea, in which the ‘rotation’ is applied not to a space which is a background to the paths, in a path integral — which is the usual idea — but to the individual spacetimes which themselves constitute each path of the path integral. …

Hartle and Hawking’s striking proposal was that this path-integral approach of Hawking’s could describe the relevant quantum theory for the Big Bang itself, and that in place of an actual singular spacetime there would be a quantum superposition (i.e. ‘path integral’) of ‘spacetimes’…

 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, paths are trajectories though spacetime, whereas spacetime constitutes the dimensions in which such trajectories are measured. On this basis, an individual path is not an individual spacetime.

From this perspective, each path of a path integral is a potential path of a particle through spacetime. On this basis, there is no superposition of spacetimes in Hartle and Hawking’s proposal, only a superposition of potential trajectories through spacetime.