Related papers: Spacetime is material
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
A new kind of duality between the deep structures of spacetime and matter is proposed here, considering two partial orders which incorporate causality, extensity, and discreteness. This may have surprising consequences for the emergence of…
The nature of space-time and surrounding matter objects was and persists to be a one of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing the mankind and natural scientists especially. As we know one of the most brilliant inventions in…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…
A deformation of special relativistic kinematics (possible signal of a theory of quantum gravity at low energies) leads to a modification of the notion of spacetime. At the classical level, this modification is required when one considers a…
In a way similar to classical mechanics where we have the concept of inertial time as expressed in the motions of bodies, in the (special) theory of relativity we can regard the inertial time as the only notion of time at play. The inertial…
A physical theory of the world is presented under the unifying principle that all of nature is laid out before us and experienced through the passage of time. The one-dimensional progression in time is opened out into a multi-dimensional…
The physical world is quantum. However, our description of the quantum physics still relies much on concepts in classical physics and in some cases with `quantized' interpretations. The most important case example is that of spacetime. We…
Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must…
Despite the obvious utility of the concept, it has often been argued that time does not exist. I take the opposite perspective: let's imagine that time does exist, and the universe is described by a quantum state obeying ordinary…
It is rarely emphasized in modern physics textbooks that our definitions of space and time have to reflect their complete interdependence. Our intuitive methods of always picturing one-dimensional space as a sum of unit-length rods and of…
Loop quantum gravity is a perspective candidate for the quantum theory of gravity. However, there is a conceptual controversy in it: having started from the Einstein-Hilbert action and describing spacetime without matter, we can hardly…
This is a chapter for an upcoming book, "Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding", edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi. I first present the classical picture of flat space and ever-flowing time, as generally accepted…
The relationship between inner and outer time is discussed. Inner time is intrinsically future directed and possesses the quality of a distinguished "now". Both of these qualities get lost in the operationalized external physical time,…
A New Mathematico-Physical and Information Theoretic Approach Examination of the available hard core information to firm up the process of unification of quantum and gravitational physics leads to the conclusion that for achieving this…
The paper presents a metaphysical characterization of spatiotemporal backgrounds from a realist perspective. The conceptual analysis is based on a heuristic sketch that encompasses the common formal traits of the major spacetime theories,…
It will be shown that, in comparison with the pre-relativistic Galileo-invariant conceptions, special relativity tells us nothing new about the geometry of spacetime. It simply calls something else "spacetime", and this something else has…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
Among the various attempts to formulate a theory of quantum gravity, a class of approaches suggests that spacetime, as modeled by general relativity, is destined to fade away. A major issue becomes then to identify which structures may…
The question of the nature of space around us has occupied thinkers since the dawn of humanity, with scientists and philosophers today implicitly assuming that space is something that exists objectively. Here we show that this does not have…