Related papers: On the Existence of Spacetime Structure

I present a discussion of some issues in the ontology of spacetime. After a characterisation of the controversies among relationists, substantivalists, eternalists, and presentists, I offer a new argument for rejecting presentism, the…

This paper reviews the hole argument as an argument against spacetime substantivalism. After a careful presentation of the argument itself I review possible responses.

Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…

I defend algebraicism, according to which physical fields can be understood in terms of their structural relations without reference to a spacetime manifold, as a genuine relationalist view against the conventional wisdom that it is…

As repeatedly emphasized by Einstein our knowledge of the structure of space and time is based entirely on inferences from observations of physical objects and processes. At the most fundamental level these objects and processes are…

The canonical formalism of general relativity affords a particularly interesting characterisation of the infamous hole argument. It also provides a natural formalism in which to relate the hole argument to the problem of time in classical…

We provide five rearticulations of the thesis that the structure of spacetime is conventional, rather than empirically determined, based upon variation of the structures that are empirically underdetermined and modal contexts in which this…

I show that, by the same criteria that led to Galilean and Special Relativity and gauge symmetries, there is no way to identify a unique set of observables that give the structure of space or spacetime. In some sense, space is lost in the…

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…

This paper forms part of a wider campaign: to deny pointillisme. That is the doctrine that a physical theory's fundamental quantities are defined at points of space or of spacetime, and represent intrinsic properties of such points or…

Why is the manifold topology in a spacetime taken for granted? Why do we prefer to use Riemann open balls as basic-open sets, while there also exists a Lorentz metric? Which topology is a best candidate for a spacetime; a topology…

The nature of the change in perspective that accompanies the proposal of a unified physical theory deriving from the single dimension of time is elaborated. On expressing a temporal interval in a multi-dimensional form, via a direct…

This paper argues against the proposal to draw from current research into a physical theory of quantum gravity the ontological conclusion that spacetime or spatiotemporal relations are not fundamental. As things stand, the status of this…

In this two-part paper, we review, and then develop, the assessment of the hole argument for general relativity. This first Part reviews the literature hitherto, focussing on the philosophical aspects. It also introduces two main ideas we…

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…

Quantum measurement predictions are consistent with relativity for macroscopic observations, but there is no consensus on how to explain this consistency in fundamental terms. The prevailing assumption is that the relativistic structure of…

In prior work, we have argued that spacetime functionalism provides tools for clarifying the conceptual difficulties specifically linked to the emergence of spacetime in certain approaches to quantum gravity. We argue in this article that…

Minkowski space serves as a framework for the theoretical constructions that deal with manifestations of relativistic effects in physical phenomena. But neither Minkowski himself nor the subsequent developers of the relativity theory have…

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…

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…