Related papers: Causal Set Quantum Gravity and the Hard Problem of…
Researchers have long been aiming to understand how the characteristics of Quantum Theory and General Relativity combine to account for regimes in their interface. One reason why this is a hard task is how differently the theories approach…
More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case…
After sketching a context in which to seek observable signals of spatio-temporal discreteness, I briefly review the status of the causal set program for quantum gravity, concluding with a simple model for the field produced by a moving…
The causal set approach to the problem of quantum gravity is based on the hypothesis that spacetime is fundamentally discrete. Spacetime discreteness opens the door to novel types of dynamical law for cosmology and the Classical Sequential…
Quantum theory in a global space-time gives rise to non-local correlations, which cannot be explained causally in a satisfactory way; this motivates the study of theories with reduced global assumptions. Oreshkov, Costa, and Brukner (2012)…
We describe a new class of models of quantum space-time based on energetic causal sets and show that under natural conditions space-time emerges from them. These are causal sets whose causal links are labelled by energy and momentum and…
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…
In a previous paper, the author introduced a covariant causet ($c$-causet) approach to discrete quantum gravity. A $c$-causet is a finite partially ordered set that is invariant under labeling. The invariant labeling of a $c$-causet $x$…
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. General relativity is a deterministic theory but where the causal structure is dynamic. It is reasonable to expect that quantum gravity will be a probabilistic theory…
Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…
In general relativity, `causal structure' refers to the partial order on space-time points (or regions) that encodes time-like relationships. Recently, quantum information and quantum foundations saw the emergence of a `causality…
Certain approaches to quantum gravity, such as the one based on the concept of purely virtual particles (fakeons), sacrifice the cause-effect relation at very small scales to reconcile renormalizability with unitarity. Other developments…
In the present work, quantum theory is founded on the framework of consciousness, in contrast to earlier suggestions that consciousness might be understood starting from quantum theory. The notion of streams of consciousness, usually…
Identifying an appropriate set of ``observables'' is a nontrivial task for most approaches to quantum gravity. We describe how it may be accomplished in the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic (but classical) dynamical laws…
We give a broad overview of a construction of a theory for matter on fixed causal set backgrounds. We introduce the Sorkin-Johnston formalism for a free (real) scalar field theory that is applicable to regions of continuum spacetimes as…
In this paper I argue that the fundamental aspect of our notion of time is that it defines an order relation, be it a total order relation between configurations of the world or just a partial order relation between events. This position is…
The ``generic'' family of classical sequential growth dynamics for causal sets provides cosmological models of causal sets which are a testing ground for ideas about the, as yet unknown, quantum theory. In particular we can investigate how…
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).
A new approach to quantum gravity is described which joins the loop representation formulation of the canonical theory to the causal set formulation of the path integral. The theory assigns quantum amplitudes to special classes of causal…
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…