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Equation 65 · Part 2 · The Atlas That Refuses to Close

Symbol u

Xμ(u,Σ)X^\mu(u,\Sigma)
uu

What this part means

u is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

Its job in the formula

u is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

The passage around this formula

It is worth being precise about what kind of object each chart in this pairing actually is, because the two are not interchangeable answers to the same experiment. Xμ(u,Σ)X^\mu(u,\Sigma) , built from a classical or semiclassical stress-energy distribution, is a number: a spacetime point associated with one physical configuration. XNW\mathbf X_{\mathrm{NW}} is an operator on a Hilbert space, and what a quantum experiment actually reports is not XNW\mathbf X_{\mathrm{NW}} itself but expectation values and, eventually, click statistics built from it. The two charts answer “where is it” for two different kinds of description of the same underlying physics, classical field and quantum state, and the atlas has…

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A function assigns an output to each allowed input. The expression f(x) means “apply f to x”.

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