Related papers: Causality in Physics: From Galileo to Einstein, an…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…
Quantum theory can be understood as pointing to an ontology of relations. I observe that this reading of quantum mechanics is supported by the ubiquity of relationality in contemporary fundamental physics, including in classical mechanics,…
In this article we set out to understand the significance of the process matrix formalism and the quantum causal modelling programme for ongoing disputes about the role of causation in fundamental physics. We argue that the process matrix…
Based on the model of a "soft" cellular space and deterministic quantum mechanics developed previously, the scattering of a free moving particle by structural units of the space -- superparticles -- is studied herein. The process of energy…
In the causal set approach to quantum gravity the spacetime continuum arises as an approximation to a fundamentally discrete substructure, the causal set, which is a locally finite partially ordered set. The causal set paradigm was…
The landscape of causal relations that can hold among a set of systems in quantum theory is richer than in classical physics. In particular, a pair of time-ordered systems can be related as cause and effect or as the effects of a common…
Causality violations are typically seen as unrealistic and undesirable features of a physical model. The following points out three reasons why causality violations, which Bonnor and Steadman identified even in solutions to the Einstein…
The formalism of classical particle dynamics is reinvestigated according to the basic requirement of causal consistency, and a new equation of particle dynamics, which is more general and more in line with classical mechanics experiments…
This paper presents an brief review of some recent work on the causal set approach to quantum gravity. Causal sets are a discretisation of spacetime that allow the symmetries of GR to be preserved in the continuum approximation. One…
This work outlines the novel application of the empirical analysis of causation, presented by Kutach, to the study of information theory and its role in physics. The central thesis of this paper is that causation and information are…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
In this short review, we explain how and in which sense the causal action principle for causal fermion systems gives rise to classical gravity and the Einstein equations. Moreover, methods are presented for going beyond classical gravity,…
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…
Causal set theory offers a simple and elegant picture of discrete physics. But the vast majority of causal sets look nothing at all like continuum spacetimes, and must be excluded in some way to obtain a realistic theory. I describe recent…
We revisit the standard axioms of domain theory with emphasis on their relation to the concept of partiality, explain how this idea arises naturally in probability theory and quantum mechanics, and then search for a mathematical setting…
An odd look at "standard" physics (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac) leading to a radical change of our concept of inertial motion and to new heuristic approaches of gravitation and the cosmological constant.
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…