Related papers: Temporal relationalism
The causal set approach to quantum gravity embodies the concepts of causality and discreteness. This article explores some foundational and conceptual issues within causal set theory.
The landscape of causal relations that can hold among a set of systems in quantum theory is richer than in classical physics. In particular, a pair of time-ordered systems can be related as cause and effect or as the effects of a common…
Although the standard viewpoint in theoretical physics is that the unification of quantum theory and general relativity requires the quantization of gravity and spacetime, there is not consensus about whether spacetime must fundamentally…
After reviewing various interpretations of structural realism, I adopt here a definition that allows both relations between things that are already individuated (which I call ``relations between things'') and relations that individuate…
Following recent assumptions to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the structure of spacetime is suppose to be a consequence of the relations among some fundamental objects, and its concept can be formulated without the…
We explore the consequences of requiring that quantum theories of gravity be unitary, mostly focusing on simple cosmological models to illustrate the main points. We show that unitarity for a clock that encounters a classical singularity at…
We have performed an experimental test under the conditions of which quantum mechanics predicts a spatially-discontinuous single-particle transport. The transport is beyond the relativistic paradigm of movement in Cartesian space and…
It is argued that substantial portions of both Newtonian particle mechanics and general relativity can be viewed as relational (rather than absolute) theories. I furthermore use the relational particle models as toy models to investigate…
Recent developments in holographic gravity suggest that spacetime structure may be deeply related to quantum mechanics. In this work, from a different perspective, we demonstrate that wave-particle duality can be interpreted as the…
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…
The study of causal relations has recently been applied to the quantum realm, leading to the discovery that not all physical processes have a definite causal structure. While indefinite causal processes have previously been experimentally…
Generalized uncertainty principles are able to serve as useful descriptions of some of the phenomenology of quantum gravity effects, providing an intuitive grasp on non-trivial space-time structures such as a fundamental discreteness of…
A century after the advent of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, both theories enjoy incredible empirical success, constituting the cornerstones of modern physics. Yet, paradoxically, they suffer from deep-rooted, so-far intractable,…
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…
A recently introduced discrete formalism allows to solve the problem of time in quantum gravity in a relational manner. Quantum mechanics formulated with a relational time is not exactly unitary and implies a fundamental mechanism for…
General relativity allows solutions exhibiting closed timelike curves. Time travel generates paradoxes and quantum mechanics generalizations were proposed to solve those paradoxes. The implications of self-consistent interactions on acausal…
We describe a theory amalgamating quantum theory and general relativity through the identification of a continuous 4-dimensional spacetime arena constructed from the substructures of a generalised multi-dimensional form for proper time. In…
By studying the set of correlations that are theoretically possible between physical systems without allowing for signalling of information backwards in time, we here identify correlations that can only be achieved if the time ordering…
General Theory of Relativity and Quantum theory gives two different description of the same mother nature in the big and small scale respectively. Mathematical languages of these two theories are entirely different, one is geometric while…
A practical way to deal with the problem of time in quantum cosmology and quantum gravity is proposed. The main tool is effective equations, which mainly restrict explicit considerations to semiclassical regimes but have the crucial…