Related papers: Causal spin foams and the ontology of spacetime
We review some modern theories about the structure of space and time, in particular those related to discrete space and time. Following an epistemological method we start from theories which discuss discrete space and time as a mathematical…
As repeatedly emphasized by Einstein our knowledge of the structure of space and time is based entirely on inferences from observations of physical objects and processes. At the most fundamental level these objects and processes are…
Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…
Spacetime foam is analyzed within the simplistic model of a set of scalar fields on a flat background. We suggest the formula for the path integral which allows to account for the all possible topologies of spacetime. We show that the…
Spin foam models are the path integral counterparts to loop quantized canonical theories. In the last few years several spin foam models of gravity have been proposed, most of which live on finite simplicial lattice spacetime. The lattice…
We discuss the notion of causality in Quantum Gravity in the context of sum-over-histories approaches, in the absence therefore of any background time parameter. In the spin foam formulation of Quantum Gravity, we identify the appropriate…
Current theories of particle physics, including the standard model, are dominated by the paradigm that nature is basically translation invariant. Deviations from translation invariance are described by the action of forces. General…
The full causal ladder of spacetimes is constructed, and their updated main properties are developed. Old concepts and alternative definitions of each level of the ladder are revisited, with emphasis in minimum hypotheses. The implications…
The ontology proposed in this paper is aimed at demonstrating that it is possible to understand the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum mechanics while still retaining much of the framework underlying classical physics, the implication…
Causality is one of the fundamental structures of spacetimes, determining the possible behaviour and propagation of physical information. Causal structure can be analysed through the various modal logics it induces. The modal logics for the…
A mathematical formalism for treating spacetime topology as a quantum observable is provided. We describe spacetime foam entirely in algebraic terms. To implement the correspondence principle we express the classical spacetime manifold of…
I present a discussion of some issues in the ontology of spacetime. After a characterisation of the controversies among relationists, substantivalists, eternalists, and presentists, I offer a new argument for rejecting presentism, the…
In this paper, we argue that spacetime in causal fermion systems can be understood as the web of correlations of a many-body quantum system.This argument highlights the fact that causal fermion systems is a completely relational theory. We…
The causal structure of space-time offers a natural notion of an opposite or orthogonal in the logical sense, where the opposite of a set is formed by all points non time-like related with it. We show that for a general space-time the…
We present current theories about the structure of space and time, where the building blocks are some fundamental entities (yes-no experiment, quantum processes, spin net-work, preparticles) that do not presuppose the existence of space and…
Why is the manifold topology in a spacetime taken for granted? Why do we prefer to use Riemann open balls as basic-open sets, while there also exists a Lorentz metric? Which topology is a best candidate for a spacetime; a topology…
A logical model of spatiotemporal structures is pictured as a succession of processes in time. One usual way to formalize time structure is to assume the global existence of time points and then collect some of them to form time intervals…
A list of all possible causal relations in the $2$-dimensional Minkowski space $M$ is exhausted, based on the duality between timelike and spacelike in this particular case, and thirty topologies are introduced, all of them encapsulating…
The spin foam framework provides a way to define the dynamics of canonical loop quantum gravity in a spacetime covariant way, by using a path integral over histories of quantum states which can be interpreted as `quantum space-times'. This…
Starting from Bunge's (1977) scientific ontology, we expose a materialistic relational theory of space-time, that carries out the program initiated by Leibniz, and provides a protophysical basis consistent with any rigorous formulation of…