Related papers: Relativistic causality and clockless circuits
The difficulty of explaining non-local correlations in a fixed causal structure sheds new light on the old debate on whether space and time are to be seen as fundamental. Refraining from assuming space-time as given a priori has a number of…
Causality in distributed systems is a concept that has long been explored and numerous approaches have been made to use causality as a way to trace distributed system execution. Traditional approaches usually used system profiling and newer…
By relating and ordering events, causality constitutes a pivotal feature of our world. On the one hand, there are information-theoretic notions of causality defined in terms of the information processing ability of agents and on the other…
In a way similar to classical mechanics where we have the concept of inertial time as expressed in the motions of bodies, in the (special) theory of relativity we can regard the inertial time as the only notion of time at play. The inertial…
Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and…
We take causality and uniqueness of events observation as our driving forces. They are built in in the way we define distinct observers, which then require a finite time to communicate between each other. This unavoidably leads to the…
Even in the absence of clocks, time bounds on the duration of actions enable the use of time for distributed coordination. This paper initiates an investigation of coordination in such a setting. A new communication structure called a…
The basic tenet of the present work is the assumption of the lack of external and fixed time in the Universe. This assumption is best embodied by general relativity, which replaces the fixed space-time structure with the gravitational…
We investigate temporal and causal threads in the fabric of contemporary physical theories with an emphasis on empirical and operationalistic aspects. Building on the axiomatization of general relativity proposed by J. Ehlers, F. Pirani and…
Some authors in the quantum gravity community endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a radical relationalist view of time which states that the ordinal structure of time is not needed even in our classical theories, especially in general…
Elementary particles, i.e. the basic constituents of nature, are characterized by quantum recurrences in time. The flow of time of every physical system can be therefore decomposed in elementary cycles of time. This allows us to enforce the…
In relational quantum dynamics, evolution emerges via the correlations between some system of interest and a clock system, which plays the role of a temporal reference frame. Their combined state satisfies a Wheeler-de Witt-like constraint…
Synchronizing clocks to measure time is a fundamental process underpinning every practical communication task from GPS to parallel computation. However, as the current protocols are based on classical communication between the sender and…
We discuss the usual account of causal structure that relies on the temporal precedence constraint between cause-effect pairs. In particular, we consider the subtle interplay between local and global characters of time and causality encoded…
In an apparently unexplored region of relativistic spacetime, a simple thought experiment demonstrates that conjoined Lorentz transformations predict a proper clock at rest will run backwards and that prediction violates the logical…
Lamport's 1978 paper introduced the happens-before relation and logical clocks, freeing distributed systems from dependence on synchronized physical clocks. This is widely understood as a move away from Newtonian absolute time. We argue…
In this review paper, we consider the fundamental nature of time and causality, most particularly, in the context of the theories of special and general relativity. We also discuss the issue of closed timelike curves in the context of…
The abstraction introduced by von Neumann correctly reflected the state of the art 70 years ago. Although it omitted data transmission time between components of the computer, it served as an excellent base for classic computing for…
The theory of relativistic {\em location systems} is sketched. An interesting class of these systems is that of relativistic {\em positioning systems,} which consists in sets of four clocks broadcasting their proper time. Among them, the…
In general relativity, the picture of spacetime assigns an ideal clock to each worldline. Being ideal, gravitational effects due to these clocks are ignored and the flow of time according to one clock is not affected by the presence of…