Related papers: Spacetime might not be doomed after all

Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…

We give a brief overview of the nature of spacetime emerging from string theory. This is radically different from the familiar spacetime of Einstein's relativity. At a perturbative level, the spacetime metric appears as ``coupling…

General relativity promotes space-time to a physical, dynamical object subject to equations of motion. Quantum gravity, accordingly, must provide a quantum framework for space-time, applicable on the smallest distance scales. Just like…

We present a novel derivation of both the Minkowski metric and Lorentz transformations from the consistent quantification of a causally ordered set of events with respect to an embedded observer. Unlike past derivations, which have relied…

In contemporary physics space and time are intertwined entities so that kinematical and dynamical quantities are expressed in the four-dimensional space-time. This formulation seems to contradict our every-day experience and perception…

Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…

Cosmology and particle physics have long been dominated by theoretical paradigms: Einstein's general theory of relativity in cosmology and the Standard Model of particle physics. The time may have come for paradigm shifts. Does cosmological…

I present a discussion of some issues in the ontology of spacetime. After a characterisation of the controversies among relationists, substantivalists, eternalists, and presentists, I offer a new argument for rejecting presentism, the…

Our purpose here is to introduce the idea of viewing the spacetime as a macroscopic complex system which, consequently, cannot be directly quantized. It should be thought of as a collection of more fundamental "microscopical" entities…

Spacetime is conventionally viewed as a stage on which actors, in the form of fields, move. Here, we explore what may lie beyond this picture. The starting point is the observation that quantum fluctuations of fields are the more strongly…

There is a venerable position in the philosophy of space and time that holds that the geometry of spacetime is conventional, provided one is willing to postulate a "universal force field". Here we ask a more focused question, inspired by…

Special relativity is most naturally formulated as a theory of space-time geometry, but within the space-time framework probability apears to be at best an epistemic notion - a matter of what can be known, not of the status of events in…

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…

This paper continues the development of a discrete space-time concept that is recently used in the explanation of the cosmological constant. Instead of order estimation, a more theoretical treatment of the theory is introduced. Based on the…

A discursive, non-technical, analysis is made of some of the basic issues that arise in almost any approach to quantum gravity, and of how these issues stand in relation to recent developments in the field. Specific topics include the…

If gravity respects quantum mechanics, it is important to identify the essential postulates of a quantum framework capable of incorporating gravitational phenomena. Such a construct likely requires elimination or modification of some of the…

It is still uncertain whether the cosmic censorship conjecture is true or not. To get a new insight into this issue, we propose the concept of the border of spacetime as a generalization of the spacetime singularity and discuss its…

Quantum gravity, as a fundamental theory of space-time, is expected to reveal how the universe may have started, perhaps during or before an inflationary epoch. It may then leave a potentially observable (but probably minuscule) trace in…

It is proposed that spacetime should be regarded as an evolving block universe, bounded to the future by the present time, which continually extends to the future. This future boundary is defined at each time by measuring proper time along…

I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…