Related papers: The future is not always open
Bell appealed to the theory of relativity in formulating his principle of local causality. But he maintained that quantum field theories do not conform to that principle, even when their field equations are relativistically covariant and…
It is difficult to extract reliable criteria for causal locality from the limited ingredients found in textbook quantum theory. In the end, Bell humbly warned that his eponymous theorem was based on criteria that "should be viewed with the…
We fully develop the concept of causal symmetry introduced in Class. Quant. Grav. 20 (2003) L139. A causal symmetry is a transformation of a Lorentzian manifold (V,g) which maps every future-directed vector onto a future-directed vector. We…
Causality is one of the fundamental structures of spacetimes, determining the possible behaviour and propagation of physical information. Causal structure can be analysed through the various modal logics it induces. The modal logics for the…
We discuss the geometry of timelike surfaces (two-dimensional submanifolds) in a Lorentzian manifold and its interpretation in terms of general relativity. A classification of such surfaces is presented which distinguishes four cases of…
As shown by Gott, a pair of straight cosmic strings moving in opposite directions, when they have suitable speed and impact parameter, produce closed timelike curves. I argue in this paper that there always is a not-so-frightening…
In general relativity, closed timelike curves can break causality with remarkable and unsettling consequences. At the classical level, they induce causal paradoxes disturbing enough to motivate conjectures that explicitly prevent their…
We prove a transverse diameter theorem in the context of Lorentzian foliations, which can be interpreted as a Hawking--Penrose-type singularity theorem for timelike geodesics transverse to the foliation. In order to develop the necessary…
A discrete model of Lorentzian quantum gravity is proposed. The theory is completely background free, containing no reference to absolute space, time, or simultaneity. The states at one slice of time are networks in which each vertex is…
Following on from the notion of (first-order) causality, which generalises the notion of being tracepreserving from CP-maps to abstract processes, we give a characterization for the most general kind of map which sends causal processes to…
Let $C$ be an irreducible projective plane curve in the complex projective space ${\mathbb{P}}^2$. The classification of such curves, up to the action of the automorphism group $PGL(3,{\mathbb{C}})$ on ${\mathbb{P}}^2$, is a very difficult…
Minkowski space is the local model of 3 dimensionnal flat spacetimes. Recent progress in the description of globally hyperbolic flat spacetimes showed strong link between Lorentzian geometry and Teichm{\"u}ller space. We notice that…
It is shown that if a space-time has non-compact Cauchy surface, then its topological, differentiable, and causal structure are completely determined by a class of compact subsets of its Cauchy surface. Since causal structure determines its…
An important, if relatively less well known aspect of the singularity theorems in Lorentzian Geometry is to understand how their conclusions fare upon weakening or suppression of one or more of their hypotheses. Then, theorems with modified…
We propose a formulation of a Lorentzian quantum geometry based on the framework of causal fermion systems. After giving the general definition of causal fermion systems, we deduce space-time as a topological space with an underlying causal…
The existence of time machines, understood as spacetime constructions exhibiting physically realised closed timelike curves (CTCs), would raise fundamental problems with causality and challenge our current understanding of classical and…
The appearance of linear spaces, describing physical quantities by vectors and tensors, is ubiquitous in all of physics, from classical mechanics to the modern notion of local Lorentz invariance. However, as natural as this seems to the…
Causality is a non-obvious concept that is often considered to be related to temporality. In this paper we present a number of past and present approaches to the definition of temporality and causality from philosophical, physical, and…
In this paper we construct the action describing dynamics of the particle moving in curved spacetime, with a non-trivial momentum space geometry. Curved momentum space is the core feature of theories where relative locality effects are…
The work of Sprungk (Inverse Problems, 2020) established the local Lipschitz continuity of the misfit-to-posterior and prior-to-posterior maps with respect to the Kullback--Leibler divergence and the total variation, Hellinger, and…