Related papers: Causal Sets: Quantum gravity from a fundamentally …
Central to the development of any new theory is the investigation of the observable consequences of the theory. In the search for quantum gravity, research in phenomenology has been dominated by models violating Lorentz invariance (LI) --…
Quantum gravity (or quantum spacetime) is to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theoretical framework and presented as the most important open puzzle in fundamental physics. The development of a microscopic theory…
This article begins by reviewing the causal set approach in discrete quantum gravity. In our version of this approach a special role is played by covariant causal sets which we call $c$-causets. The importance of $c$-causets is that they…
More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case…
General Relativity traces the evolution of our Universe back to a Big Bang singularity. To probe physics before the singularity -- if indeed there is a ``before'' -- we must turn to quantum gravity. The Causal Set approach to quantum…
Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must…
Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…
In fundamental theories that accounts for quantum gravitational effects, the spacetime causal structure is expected to be quantum uncertain. Previous studies of quantum causal structure focused on finite-dimensional systems. Here we present…
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. General relativity is a deterministic theory but where the causal structure is dynamic. It is reasonable to expect that quantum gravity will be a probabilistic theory…
Starting from certain causality conditions and a discrete form of general covariance, we derive a very general family of classically stochastic, sequential growth dynamics for causal sets. The resulting theories provide a relatively…
Causal set theory is a discrete model of spacetime that retains a notion of causal structure. We understand how to construct causal sets that approximate a given spacetime, but most causal sets are not at all manifold-like, and must be…
The Causal Set hypothesis asserts that spacetime, ultimately, is discrete and its underlying structure is that of a locally finite partial ordered set, and macroscopic causality reflects a deeper notion of order in terms of which all the…
An argument is presented that if a theory of quantum gravity is physically discrete at the Planck scale and the theory recovers General Relativity as an approximation, then, at the current stage of our knowledge, causal sets must arise…
We begin by describing a sequential growth model in which the universe grows one element at a time in discrete time steps. At each step, the process has the form of a causal set and the "completed" universe is given by a path consisting of…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
Causal fermion systems are introduced as a general mathematical framework for formulating relativistic quantum theory. By specializing, we recover earlier notions like fermion systems in discrete space-time, the fermionic projector and…
Non-perturbative theories of quantum gravity inevitably include configurations that fail to resemble physically reasonable spacetimes at large scales. Often, these configurations are entropically dominant and pose an obstacle to obtaining…
We focus on the question: "Is space fundamentally discrete or continuous?" in the context of current quantum gravity research. In particular, we paint a scenario based on the idea that 'quantum space' is a sort of peculiar condensed matter…
We discuss the causal set approach to discrete quantum gravity. We begin by describing a classical sequential growth process in which the universe grows one element at a time in discrete steps. At each step the process has the form of a…
We briefly survey open questions in cosmology that either have been or could potentially be addressed with the help of the causal set theory approach to quantum gravity. Our discussion includes topics ranging from dark matter and dark…