Related papers: Is spacetime as physical as is space?
Out of several possible extensions of general relativity, the scalar-tensor theory is the most popular for several reasons. Since the quantum description of gravity is yet to be formulated properly, the understanding of a gravitational…
We consider the possibility that the basic space of physics is not spacetime, but configuration space. We illustrate this on the example with a system of gravitationally interacting point particles. It turns out that such system can be…
The nature of the physical space seems the most important subject in physics. A present paper proceeds from the assumption of physical reality of space contrary to the standard view of the space as a purely relational nonexistence - void.…
All gauge theories need ``something fixed'' even as ``something changes.'' Underlying the implementation of these ideas all major physical theories make indispensable use of an elaborately designed spacetime model as the ``something…
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…
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…
Physics is formulated in terms of timeless classical mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.
This paper challenges some of the common assumptions underlying the mathematics used to describe the physical world. We start by reviewing many of the assumptions underlying the concepts of real, physical, rigid bodies and the translational…
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…
Theories of emergent gravity have established a deep connection between entropy and the geometry of spacetime by looking at the latter through a thermodynamic lens. In this framework, the macroscopic properties of gravity arise in a…
Only a severely restricted class of tensor fields can provide classical spacetime geometries, namely those that can carry matter field equations that are predictive, interpretable and quantizable. These three conditions on matter translate…
I describe several conceptual aspects of a particular paradigm which treats the field equations of gravity as emergent. These aspects are related to the features of classical gravitational theories which defy explanation within the…
Recently, in a series of papers, we established the existence and found a general solution for the simultaneously rotating and twisting locally rotationally symmetric spacetimes in general relativity, which can model inhomogeneous and…
Conventional approaches to quantum gravity regard quantum principles, such as nonlocality and superposition, as fundamental properties of nature and therefore argue that gravity must also be quantized. In contrast, this work introduces a…
Emergent gravity views spacetime as an entity emergent from a more complete theory of interacting fundamental constituents valid at much finer resolution or higher energies, usually assumed to be above the Planck energy. In this view…
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 propose a formal definition of a general reference frame in a general spacetime, as an equivalence class of charts. This formal definition corresponds with the notion of a reference frame as being a (fictitious) deformable body, but we…
The configuration space of general relativity is superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics modulo diffeomorphisms. However, it has been argued that the configuration space for gravity should be conformal superspace - the space of…
While Quantum Gravity remains elusive and Quantum Field Theory retains the interpretational difficulties of Quantum Mechanics, we have introduced an alternate approach to the unification of particles, fields, space and time, suggesting that…
Relativity and classical dynamics, as defined so far, form distinct parts of classical physics and are formulated based on independent principles. We propose that the formalism of classical dynamics can be considered as the theoretical…