Related papers: Spacetime Conventionalism Revisited
The picture of space-time that Minkowski created in 1907 has been followed by two important developments in physics not contained in the original picture: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We will argue that the use of concepts of…
This paper challenges some of the common assumptions underlying the mathematics used to describe the physical world. We start by reviewing many of the assumptions underlying the concepts of real, physical, rigid bodies and the translational…
Space-time in quantum mechanics is about bridging Hilbert and configuration space. Thereby, an entirely new perspective is obtained by replacing the Newtonian space-time theater with the image of a presumably high-dimensional Hilbert space,…
One of the most fundamental questions of modern physics is the nature of spacetime. There are various propositions on the table, as the grand unified theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetry, string and superstring theories, and M theory.…
I present a brief review on space and time in different periods of physics, and then talk on the nature of space and time from physical arguments. I discuss the ways to test such a new perspective on space and time through searching for…
This survey paper is divided into two parts. In the first (section 2), I give a brief account of the structure of classical relativity theory. In the second (section 3), I discuss three special topics: (i) the status of the relative…
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…
We expect a theory of Quantum Gravity to be both probabilistic and have indefinite causal structure. Indefinite causal structure poses particular problems for theory formulation since many of the core ideas used in the usual approaches to…
We discuss how to embed quantum nonlocality in an approximately classical spacetime background, a question which must be answered irrespective of any underlying microscopic theory of spacetime. We argue that, in deterministic…
The spin-statistics connection, quantum gravity and other physical considerations suggest that classical space-time topology is not an immutable attribute and can change in quantum physics. The implementation of topology change using…
We review how reparametrization of space and time, namely the procedure where both are made to depend on yet another parameter, can be used to formulate quantum physics in a way that is naturally conducive to relativity. This leads us to a…
Recent criticism of higher-dimensional extensions of Einstein's theory is considered. This may have some justification as regards string theory, but is misguided as applied to five-dimensional theories with a large extra dimension. Such…
A logical model of spatiotemporal structures is pictured as a succession of processes in time. One usual way to formalize time structure is to assume the global existence of time points and then collect some of them to form time intervals…
In fundamental theories that accounts for quantum gravitational effects, the spacetime causal structure is expected to be quantum uncertain. Previous studies of quantum causal structure focused on finite-dimensional systems. Here we present…
The canonical formalism of general relativity affords a particularly interesting characterisation of the infamous hole argument. It also provides a natural formalism in which to relate the hole argument to the problem of time in classical…
Interpretational problems with quantum mechanics can be phrased precisely by only talking about empirically accessible information. This prompts a mathematical reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of classical mechanics. We survey…
The existence of small amounts of advanced radiation, or a tilt in the arrow of time, makes the basic equations of physics mixed-type functional differential equations. The novel features of such equations point to a microphysical structure…
Any acceptable quantum gravity theory must allow us to recover the classical spacetime in the appropriate limit. Moreover, the spacetime geometrical notions should be intrinsically tied to the behavior of the matter that probes them. We…
We investigate the cosmological behavior in a universe governed by time asymmetric extensions of general relativity, which is a novel modified gravity based on the addition of new, time-asymmetric, terms on the Hamiltonian framework, in a…
An attempt to get a non-trivial-mass structure of particles in a Randall-Sundrum type of 5-dimensional spacetime with q-deformed extra dimension is discussed. In this spacetime, the fifth dimensional space is boundary free, but there…