Related papers: On the ontology of spacetime

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 examine the debate between substantivalists and relationalists about the ontological character of spacetime and conclude it is not well posed. I argue that the so-called Hole Argument does not bear on the debate, because it provides no…

I discuss the ontological assumptions and implications of General Relativity. I maintain that General Relativity is a theory about gravitational fields, not about space-time. The latter is a more basic ontological category, that emerges…

The idea of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic beliefs about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. I show in this article that presentism, the doctrine…

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…

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…

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…

I present a discussion of some open issues in the philosophy of space-time theories. Emphasis is put on the ontological nature of space and time, the relation between determinism and predictability, the origin of irreversible processes in…

Is presentism compatible with relativity ? This question has been much debated since the argument first proposed by Rietdijk and Putnam. The goal of this text is to study the implications of relativity and quantum mechanics on presentism,…

I would like to consider the Beginning of space-time in this paper. First of all, we do consideration historical thought. A lot of philosophers have considered the relation between this real phenomenal world and the basic world in which the…

Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…

Eternalism is the view that the past, the present and the future exist simpliciter. A typical argument in favor of this view leans on the relativity of simultaneity. The 'equally real with' relation is assumed to be transitive between…

This paper discusses how the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics can provide for a natural account of the emergence of spacetime events from a quantum substratum. In this account, spacetime is not a substantive manifold that…

This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations changing.…

What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…

In the first part of the paper I argue that an ontology of events is precise, flexible and general enough so as to cover the three main alternative formulations of quantum mechanics as well as theories advocating an antirealistic view of…

We summarize the arguments that space and time are likely to be emergent notions; i.e. they are not present in the fundamental formulation of the theory, but appear as approximate macroscopic concepts. Along the way we briefly review…

We present some modern theories on the structure of spacetime that can be classified as relational theories in the direction of Leibniz's ontology. In order to analyze the nature of spacetime we consider three levels of knowledge…

The paper puts forward a conceptual framework in which the phenomenon of time can be presented and discussed in a proper way. We argue that change is ontologically and epistemologically a more basic phenomenon than time. Time is an abstract…

In this paper I argue that the fundamental aspect of our notion of time is that it defines an order relation, be it a total order relation between configurations of the world or just a partial order relation between events. This position is…