Related papers: Aspects of $C^0$ causal theory
Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider certain aspects of classical causality. The 'central mystery' of quantum mechanics manifests in different ways, depending on the interpretation. This mystery can be formulated as the possibility of…
There is growing interest in the study of causal methods in the Earth sciences. However, most applications have focused on causal discovery, i.e. inferring the causal relationships and causal structure from data. This paper instead examines…
The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…
We consider a very general class of theories, process theories, which capture the underlying structure common to most theories of physics as we understand them today (be they established, toy or speculative theories). Amongst these…
We present a number of open problems within general relativity. After a brief introduction to some technical mathematical issues and the famous singularity theorems, we discuss the cosmic censorship hypothesis and the Penrose inequality,…
Philosophical analyses of causation take many forms but one major difficulty they all aim to address is that of the spatio-temporal continuity between causes and their effects. Bertrand Russell in 1913 brought the problem to its most…
We describe an algebraic way to code the causal information of a discrete spacetime. The causal set C is transformed to a description in terms of the causal pasts of the events in C. This is done by an evolving set, a functor which to each…
The influential theorems of Hawking and Penrose demonstrate that spacetime singularities are ubiquitous features of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. The utility of classical general relativity in describing gravitational…
End state of gravitational collapse and the related cosmic censorship conjecture continue to be amongst the most important open problems in gravitation physics today. My purpose here is to bring out several aspects related to gravitational…
There is a deep structural link between acausal spacetimes and quantum theory. As a consequence quantum theory may resolve some "paradoxes" of time travel. Conversely, non-time-orientable spacetimes naturally give rise to electric charges…
Strong cosmic censorship holds that given suitable initial data on a spacelike hypersurface, the laws of general relativity should determine, completely and uniquely, the future evolution of the spacetime. Here it is argued that while…
We begin with a brief summary of issues encountered involving causality in quantum theory, placing careful emphasis on the assumptions involved in results such as the EPR paradox and Bell's inequality. We critique some solutions to the…
Causal structures give us a way to understand the origin of observed correlations. These were developed for classical scenarios, but quantum mechanical experiments necessitate their generalisation. Here we study causal structures in a broad…
This is a chapter of the planned monograph "Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity", co-authored by Nick Huggett and Christian W\"uthrich and under contract with Oxford University Press. (More information…
By relating and ordering events, causality constitutes a pivotal feature of our world. On the one hand, there are information-theoretic notions of causality defined in terms of the information processing ability of agents and on the other…
The aim of this article is to promote the use of probabilistic methods in the study of problems in mathematical general relativity. Two new and simple singularity theorems, whose features are different from the classical singularity…
In this position paper we discuss three main shortcomings of existing approaches to counterfactual causality from the computer science perspective, and sketch lines of work to try and overcome these issues: (1) causality definitions should…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
An argument is presented that if a theory of quantum gravity is physically discrete at the Planck scale and the theory recovers General Relativity as an approximation, then, at the current stage of our knowledge, causal sets must arise…
This article presents the most interesting philosophical issues as they arise in causal set theory. The first concerns the apparent disappearance of spacetime at the fundamental level. It shows how the looming empirical incoherence is…