Related papers: Out of Nowhere: Spacetime from causality: causal s…
The ideas of spacetime discreteness and causality are important in several of the popular approaches to quantum gravity. But if discreteness is accepted as an initial assumption, conflict with Lorentz invariance can be a consequence. The…
Because of the non-locality of quantum entanglement, realist approaches to completing quantum mechanics have implications for our conception of space. Quantum gravity also is expected to predict phenomena in which the locality of classical…
I describe the history of my attempts to arrive at a discrete substratum underlying the spacetime manifold, culminating in the hypothesis that the basic structure has the form of a partial-order (i.e. that it is a causal set).
The Causal Set Theory (CST) approach to quantum gravity is motivated by the observation that, associated with any causal spacetime (M,g) is a poset (M,<), with the order relation < corresponding to the spacetime causal relation. Spacetime…
An important question that discrete approaches to quantum gravity must address is how continuum features of spacetime can be recovered from the discrete substructure. Here, we examine this question within the causal set approach to quantum…
Causal set theory offers a simple and elegant picture of discrete physics. But the vast majority of causal sets look nothing at all like continuum spacetimes, and must be excluded in some way to obtain a realistic theory. I describe recent…
This paper offers suggested improvements to the causal sets program in discrete gravity, which treats spacetime geometry as an emergent manifestation of causal structure at the fundamental scale. This viewpoint, which I refer to as the…
We study some claims in Krauss' recent book, \emph{A Universe from Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing}, that are employed to show that a universe can come from "nothing". In this brief paper, we show that many of the claims…
Within the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic dynamical laws for causal sets, one can ask whether the universe might have emerged from the quantum-gravity era with a large enough size and with sufficient homogeneity to…
A theory governing the metric and matter fields in spacetime is {\it locally causal} if the probability distribution for the fields in any region is determined solely by physical data in the region's past, i.e. it is independent of events…
We show that there exists a canonical topology, naturally connected with the causal site of J. D. Christensen and L. Crane, a pointless algebraic structure motivated by quantum gravity. Taking a causal site compatible with Minkowski space,…
Using K-causal relation introduced by Sorkin and Woolgar [26], we gener- alize results of Garcia-Parrado and Senovilla [8, 9] on causal maps. We also introduce causality conditions with respect to K-causality which are analogous to those in…
This is is a copy of dissertation that I have submitted in defense of my ph.d. thesis, with some minor changes that I have made since then. The goal of the project is to generalize matter fields and their Lagrangians from regular space time…
The causal structure of space-time offers a natural notion of an opposite or orthogonal in the logical sense, where the opposite of a set is formed by all points non time-like related with it. We show that for a general space-time the…
The causal set theory (CST) approach to quantum gravity postulates that at the most fundamental level, spacetime is discrete, with the spacetime continuum replaced by locally finite posets or "causal sets". The partial order on a causal set…
We study the causal structure of a class of weakly nonlocal gravitational theories (eventually coupled to matter) that are compatible with perturbative unitarity and finiteness at quantum level. In particular, we show that in nonlocal…
This paper examines two cosmological models of quantum gravity (from string theory and loop quantum gravity) to investigate the foundational and conceptual issues arising from quantum treatments of the big bang. While the classical…
We briefly survey open questions in cosmology that either have been or could potentially be addressed with the help of the causal set theory approach to quantum gravity. Our discussion includes topics ranging from dark matter and dark…
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…
I develop Rafael D. Sorkin's proposal that a partially ordered process of the birth of spacetime atoms in causal set quantum gravity provides an objective physical correlate of our perception of time passing. I argue that one cannot have a…