Related papers: Spacetime Emergence and the Fear of Intimacy
Numerous approaches to a quantum theory of gravity posit fundamental ontologies that exclude spacetime, either partially or wholly. This situation raises deep questions about how such theories could relate to the empirical realm, since…
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…
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…
The contemporary physics has revealed growing evidences that the emergence can be applied to not only biology and condensed matter systems but also gravity and spacetime. We observe that noncommutative spacetime necessarily implies emergent…
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…
Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…
Understanding the emergence of a tangible 4-dimensional space-time from a quantum theory of gravity promises to be a tremendously difficult task. This article makes the case that this task may not have to be carried. Space-time as we know…
We discuss the hints for the disappearance of continuum space and time at microscopic scale. These include arguments for a discrete nature of them or for a fundamental non-locality, in a quantum theory of gravity. We discuss how these ideas…
Spacetime emergence refers to the notion that classical spacetime "emerges" as an approximate macroscopic entity from a non-spatio-temporal structure present in a more complete theory of interacting fundamental constituents. In this…
Quantum gravity is understood as a theory that, in some sense, unifies general relativity (GR) and quantum theory, and is supposed to replace GR at extremely small distances (high-energies). It may be that quantum gravity represents the…
We emphasize that noncommutative (NC) spacetime necessarily implies emergent spacetime if spacetime at microscopic scales should be viewed as NC. In order to understand NC spacetime correctly, we need to deactivate the thought patterns that…
We present the arguments suggesting that time is emergent in quantum gravity and discuss extensively, but without any technical detail, the many aspects that can be involved in such emergence. We refer to both the physical issues that need…
Spacetime emergence from entanglement proposes an alternative to quantizing gravity and typically derives a notion of distance based on the amount of mutual information shared across sub-systems. Albeit promising, this program still faces…
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…
We argue that space and space-time emerge as a consequence of dynamical collapse of the wave function of macroscopic objects. Locality and separability are properties of our approximate, emergent universe. At the fundamental level,…
A scenario of space-time emergence from individual interactions at the quantum level requires correlations encoding a scalar product, for large-scale emergence of space orientation. In D=4 the candidate is spin 1/2 correlations, indicating…
It is often said that in general relativity time does not exist. This is because the Einstein equations generate motion in time that is a symmetry of the theory, not true time evolution. In quantum gravity, the timelessness of general…
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…
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…
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…