Tabletop Experiments for Quantum Gravity Are Also Tests of the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in tabletop experiments intended to exhibit the quantum nature of gravity by demonstrating that it can induce entanglement. We argue that these experiments also provide new information about the interpretation of quantum mechanics: under appropriate assumptions, $\psi$-complete interpretations will generally predict that these experiments will have a positive result, $\psi$-nonphysical interpretations predict that these experiments will not have a positive result, and for $\psi$-supplemented models there may be arguments for either outcome. We suggest that a positive outcome to these experimenst would rule out a class of quantum gravity models that we refer to as $\psi$-incomplete quantum gravity (PIQG) - i.e. models of the interaction between quantum mechanics and gravity in which gravity is coupled to non-quantum beables rather than quantum beables. We review some existing PIQG models and consider what more needs to be done to make these sorts of approaches more appealing, and finally we discuss a cosmological phenomenon which could be regarded as providing evidence for PIQG models.

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