发表机构
Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学笛卡尔科学与人文学科历史与哲学中心）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
该研究探讨能量作为物质性核心的标准扩展至量子场理论后，引发引力阐释的概念变化，揭示物质与时空的经典划分在量子化后无法存续。
AI 中文摘要
能量的存在是两项标准的核心依据：其一，为所有类型经典物质的物质性提供共同内核；其二，否定广义相对论的引力场属于一种物质。将该标准扩展至量子场理论，虽形式上直接可行，却会为引力的阐释带来新的概念性后果。量子物质的应力-能量张量的重整化，迫使仅由度规构建的局域、纯几何项进入守恒应力-能量，这具有两方面的意义：一方面，度规在时空意义之外获得了物质意义（平等主义观点）；另一方面，引力能量与非引力能量被紧密绑定，二者无法分离，除非选择一个通用时空无法提供的真空（统一主义观点）。后者构成了一个两难困境：要么引力能量无意义，那么非引力量子场的能量也无意义，仅经典场保留物质属性；要么二者均有意义，度规因此获得物质场的物质意义。无论哪种情况，物质与时空之间的经典划分在量子化后均无法存续。
英文摘要
The existence of energy is the main criterion for (i) providing a common core to the materiality of all types of classical matter and (ii) denying that the gravitational field of General Relativity is a type of matter. Extending this criterion to quantum field theory, though formally straightforward, carries new conceptual consequences for the interpretation of gravity. Renormalization of the quantum matter stress-energy tensor forces a local, purely geometric term, built from the metric alone, into the conserved stress-energy, and this has two faces. It grants the metric a material significance alongside its spatio-temporal one (the egalitarian view); and it binds gravitational to non-gravitational energy so tightly that the two cannot be split apart without a choice of vacuum that a generic spacetime does not supply (the unificationist view). The latter poses a dilemma: either gravitational energy is meaningless, but then so is the energy of the non-gravitational quantum fields, and only classical fields remain matter; or both are meaningful, and the metric thereby acquires the material significance of a matter field. On neither horn does the classical divide between matter and spacetime survive quantization.
