Related papers: Relativity Is Not About Spacetime
In this two-part essay, we distinguish several senses in which general relativity has been regarded as "locally special relativistic". Here, in Part 1, we focus on senses in which a relativistic spacetime has been said to be "locally…
The controversy between relativistic causality and quantum non-locality can be resolved by establishing the general relativistic background of quantum non-locality.
In ordinary, non-relativistic, quantum physics, time enters only as a parameter and not as an observable: a state of a physical system is specified at a given time and then evolved according to the prescribed dynamics. While the state can,…
Rather than an a priori arena in which events take place, space-time is a construction of our mind making possible a particular kind of ordering of events. As quantum entanglement is a property of states independent of classical distances,…
The perspective is advanced that the time parameter in quantum mechanics corresponds to the time coordinate in a Minkowski flat spacetime local approximation to the actual dynamical curved spacetime of General Relativity, rather than to an…
It is argued that while quantum mechanics contains nonlocal or entangled states, the instantaneous or nonlocal influences sometimes thought to be present due to violations of Bell inequalities in fact arise from mistaken attempts to apply…
The quantization of time-reparametrization invariant systems such as general relativity is plagued by an ambiguity relating to the role of time in the theory. If one parametrizes observables by the (unobservable) time, and then relies on…
If Nature allowed nonlocal correlations other than those predicted by quantum mechanics, would that contradict some physical principle? Various approaches have been put forward in the past two decades in an attempt to single out quantum…
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…
We provide a framework and explicit construction for the regularized measurement of a large class of spacetime-localized observables in bosonic quantum field theory. The measurements fully satisfy relativistic causality and causal…
The conceptual definition and understanding of the nature of time, both qualitatively and quantitatively is of the utmost difficulty and importance, and plays a fundamental role in physics. Physical systems seem to evolve in paths of…
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…
The notions of events and their localisation fundamentally differ between quantum theory and general relativity, reconciling them becomes even more important and challenging in the context of quantum gravity where a classical spacetime…
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…
The need for a time-shift invariant formulation of quantum theory arises from fundamental symmetry principles as well as heuristic cosmological considerations. Such a description then leaves open the question of how to reconcile global…
In this paper we discuss Internal Relativity, a recent program to address the problem of quantum gravity. In our approach we change the relationship between spacetime and matter. Currently we view matter as propagating on spacetime.…
Special relativity is most naturally formulated as a theory of space-time geometry, but within the space-time framework probability apears to be at best an epistemic notion - a matter of what can be known, not of the status of events in…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
Challenging Mermin's perspective that ``correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not'' we argue that correlations and correlata are not fundamentally distinct. These are dual concepts depending on the tensor…
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…