Related papers: Discovering the Discrete Universe
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…
"Causal Dynamical Triangulations" (CDT) represent a lattice regularization of the sum over spacetime histories, providing us with a non-perturbative formulation of quantum gravity. The ultraviolet fixed points of the lattice theory can be…
I develop Rafael D. Sorkin's proposal that a partially ordered process of the birth of spacetime atoms in causal set quantum gravity provides an objective physical correlate of our perception of time passing. I argue that one cannot have a…
Quantum field theory (QFT) in classical spacetime has revealed interesting and puzzling aspects about gravitational systems, in particular black hole thermodynamics and its information processing. Although quantum gravitational effects may…
In the approach of Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT), quantum gravity is obtained as a scaling limit of a non-perturbative path integral over space-times whose causal structure plays a crucial role in the construction. After some…
We propose a structure called a causal site to use as a setting for quantum geometry, replacing the underlying point set. The structure has an interesting categorical form, and a natural "tangent 2-bundle," analogous to the tangent bundle…
Contrary to what is often stated, a fundamental spacetime discreteness need not contradict Lorentz invariance. A causal set's discreteness is in fact locally Lorentz invariant, and we recall the reasons why. For illustration, we introduce a…
A potentially powerful approach to quantum gravity has been developed over the last few years under the name of Causal Dynamical Triangulations. Numerical simulations have given very interesting results in the cases of two, three and four…
In this approach to discrete quantum gravity the basic structural element is a covariant causal set ($c$-causet). The geometry of a $c$-causet is described by a shell-sequence that determines the discrete gravity of a universe. In this…
The theory of causal fermion systems is a recent approach to fundamental physics. Giving quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory as limiting cases, it is a candidate for a unified physical theory. The dynamics is…
Within the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic dynamical laws for causal sets, one can ask whether the universe might have emerged from the quantum-gravity era with a large enough size and with sufficient homogeneity to…
There is growing interest in the study of causal methods in the Earth sciences. However, most applications have focused on causal discovery, i.e. inferring the causal relationships and causal structure from data. This paper instead examines…
The finiteness of black hole entropy suggest that spacetime is fundamentally discrete, and hints at an underlying relationship between geometry and "information". The foundation of this relationship is yet to be uncovered, but should…
This paper is based on the causal set approach to discrete quantum gravity. We first describe a classical sequential growth process (CSGP) in which the universe grows one element at a time in discrete steps. At each step the process has the…
The first goal of this paper is to show that discreteness, locality, and relativistic covariance can peacefully coexist if the ordinary spacetime (OST) is replaced with phase spacetime (PST) as a geometric background of a Poisson process,…
We evaluate the spectral dimension in causal set quantum gravity by simulating random walks on causal sets. In contrast to other approaches to quantum gravity, we find an increasing spectral dimension at small scales. This observation can…
This paper is based on a covariant causal set (c-causet) approach to discrete quantum gravity. A c-causet is a partially ordered set $(x,<)$ that is invariant under labeling. We first consider the microscopic picture which describes the…
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…
We discuss the origin of causal set structure and the emergence of classical space and time in the universe. Given that the universe is a closed self-referential quantum automaton with a quantum register consisting of a vast number of…
We describe the construction of quantum gravity, i.e. of a theory of self-interacting massless spin-2 quantum gauge fields, the gravitons, on flat space-time, in the framework of causal perturbation theory.