English

Determinism and general relativity

History and Philosophy of Physics 2023-06-22 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We investigate the fate of determinism in general relativity (GR), comparing the philosopher's account with the physicist's well-posed initial value formulations. The fate of determinism is interwoven with the question of what it is for a spacetime to be `physically reasonable'. A central concern is the status of global hyperbolicity, a putatively necessary condition for determinism in GR. While global hyperbolicity may fail to be true of all physically reasonable models, we analyze whether global hyperbolicity should be (i) imposed by fiat; (ii) established from weaker assumptions, as in cosmic censorship theorems; or (iii) justified by beyond-GR physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.07555,
  title  = {Determinism and general relativity},
  author = {Chris Smeenk and Christian Wuthrich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.07555},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

21 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:34:48.442Z