Related papers: Discovering the Discrete Universe
In the causal set approach, spacetime is a continuous approximation of a faithful embedded causal set. But the faithful embedded causal set describes the empty spacetime and cannot describe matter. Only faithful embedding of coarse grained…
Large scale numerical experiments are commonplace today in theoretical physics. The high performance algorithms described herein are the most compact, efficient methods known for representing and analyzing systems modeled well by sets or…
In this paper we consider a claim that in the natural world there is no fact of the matter about the spatio-temporal separation of events. In order to make sense of such a notion and construct useful models of the world, it is proposed to…
The model is a particular case of causal set. This is a discrete model of spacetime in a microscopic level. In paper the most general properties of the model are investigated without any reference to a dynamics. The dynamics of the model is…
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…
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…
A criticism sometimes made of the causal set quantum gravity program is that there is no practical scheme for identifying manifoldlike causal sets and finding embeddings of them into manifolds. A computational method for constructing an…
Although general relativity is a predictively successful theory, it treats matter as classical rather than as quantum. For this reason, it will have to be replaced by a more fundamental quantum theory of gravity. Attempts to formulate a…
Causal modelling provides a powerful set of tools for identifying causal structure from observed correlations. It is well known that such techniques fail for quantum systems, unless one introduces `spooky' hidden mechanisms. Whether one can…
Causal structures give us a way to understand the origin of observed correlations. These were developed for classical scenarios, but quantum mechanical experiments necessitate their generalisation. Here we study causal structures in a broad…
We first discuss a framework for discrete quantum processes (DQP). It is shown that the set of q-probability operators is convex and its set of extreme elements is found. The property of consistency for a DQP is studied and the quadratic…
The goal of this paper is to propose an approach to the formulation of dynamics for causal sets and coupled matter fields. We start from the continuum version of the action for a Klein-Gordon field coupled to gravity, and rewrite it first…
I describe the history of my attempts to arrive at a discrete substratum underlying the spacetime manifold, culminating in the hypothesis that the basic structure has the form of a partial-order (i.e. that it is a causal set).
Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider certain aspects of classical causality. The 'central mystery' of quantum mechanics manifests in different ways, depending on the interpretation. This mystery can be formulated as the possibility of…
Loop quantum cosmology is an application of recent developments for a non-perturbative and background independent quantization of gravity to a cosmological setting. Characteristic properties of the quantization such as discreteness of…
The method of four-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations provides a background-independent definition of the sum over geometries in quantum gravity, in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. We present the evidence…
The causal set approach to quantum gravity models spacetime as a discrete structure - a causal set. Recent research has led to causal set models for the retarded propagator for the Klein-Gordon equation and the d'Alembertian operator. These…
Curvature is a key notion in General Relativity, characterizing the local physical properties of spacetime. By contrast, the concept of curvature has received scant attention in nonperturbative quantum gravity. One may even wonder whether…
A theory governing the metric and matter fields in spacetime is {\it locally causal} if the probability distribution for the fields in any region is determined solely by physical data in the region's past, i.e. it is independent of events…
The aim of the causal dynamical triangulations approach is to define nonperturbatively a quantum theory of gravity as the continuum limit of a lattice-regularized model of dynamical geometry. My aim in this paper is to give a concise yet…