Related papers: Hyperdeterminism? Spacetime 'Analyzed'
How special (or not) is the epoch we are living in? What is the appropriate reference class for embedding the observations made at the present time? How probable -- or else -- is anything we observe in the fulness of time? Contemporary…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
This paper argues against the proposal to draw from current research into a physical theory of quantum gravity the ontological conclusion that spacetime or spatiotemporal relations are not fundamental. As things stand, the status of this…
Based on a number of experimentally verified physical observations, it is argued that the standard principles of quantum mechanics should be applied to the Universe as a whole. Thus, a paradigm is proposed in which the entire Universe is…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
In prior work, we have argued that spacetime functionalism provides tools for clarifying the conceptual difficulties specifically linked to the emergence of spacetime in certain approaches to quantum gravity. We argue in this article that…
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement"…
Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic. The arguments for the indeterminism and proposals for indeterministic and deterministic approaches are reviewed. These include collapse…
The properties of the stable distance over stable spacetimes are used as a reference to propose a simplified, abstract notion of spacetime. The discussion shows that spacetime, with its topology, causal order and (upper semi-continuous)…
Motivated by the question what it is that makes quantum mechanics a holistic theory (if so), I try to define for general physical theories what we mean by `holism'. For this purpose I propose an epistemological criterion to decide whether…
Recently, motivated by certain loop quantum gravity inspired corrections, it was shown that for spherically symmetric midisuperspace models infinitely many second derivative theories of gravity exist (as revealed by the presence of three…
We are concerned with rigid analytic geometry in the general setting of Henselian fields $K$ with separated analytic structure, whose theory was developed by Cluckers--Lipshitz--Robinson. It unifies earlier work and approaches of numerous…
Paralleling the formal derivation of general relativity as a flat spacetime theory, we introduce in addition a preferred temporal foliation. The physical interpretation of the formalism is considered in the context of 5-dimensional…
This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.…
We investigate the fate of determinism in general relativity (GR), comparing the philosopher's account with the physicist's well-posed initial value formulations. The fate of determinism is interwoven with the question of what it is for a…
The classical spacetime is usually described by a differentiable manifold with infinitely many degrees of freedom. Occasionally though, it is useful to consider an approximation whose number of degrees of freedom is finite. There are…
The phenomenologically observed flatness - or near flatness - of spacetime cannot be understood as emerging from continuum Planck (or sub-Planck) scales using known physics. Using dimensional arguments it is demonstrated that any…
The concept of time is discussed in the context of the canonical formulation of the gravitational field. Using a hypersurface orthogonal foliation, the arbitrariness of the lapse function is eliminated and the shift vector vanishes,…
Suppose we assume that (a) information about a black hole is encoded in its Hawking radiation and (b) causality is not violated to leading order in gently curved spacetime. Then we argue that spacetime cannot just be described as a manifold…