Abstract
Theoretical physicists have not wanted for imagination when it comes to developing a quantum theory of gravity. String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal-set theory, twistor theory: the approaches are diverse and the disagreements among their proponents are often vehement. And yet they have a common feature: that classical spacetime is not a fundamental ingredient of the world, but a construction consisting of more fundamental degrees of freedom. Those degrees of freedom become structured in very specific ways to give rise to the observed features of classical spacetime. I’ll discuss the interpretational implications of several leading theories.
Edited excerpt from “Spacetime Is Doomed” from SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE by George Musser. Copyright © 2015 by George Musser. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
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Barbour, The End of Time: the Next Revolution in Physics, 18.
- 2.
Bombelli et al., “Space-Time as a Causal Set.”
- 3.
Riemann, “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Bases of Geometry,” 37.
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Dowker, “Causal Sets and the Deep Structure of Spacetime,” 454; Henson, “The Causal Set Approach to Quantum Gravity,” 405.
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Konopka, Markopoulou, and Severini, “Quantum Graphity: a Model of Emergent Locality.”
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Stanley et al., “Scale Invariance and Universality: Organizing Principles in Complex Systems.”
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Hamma and Markopoulou, “Background-Independent Condensed Matter Models for Quantum Gravity.”
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Loll, Ambjørn, and Jurkiewicz, “The Universe From Scratch.”
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Banks et al., “M Theory as a Matrix Model: a Conjecture.”
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Heller and Sasin, “Einstein-Podolski-Rosen Experiment From Noncommutative Quantum Gravity”; Heller and Sasin, “Nonlocal Phenomena From Noncommutative Pre-Planckian Regime.”
- 15.
Susskind and Witten, “The Holographic Bound in Anti-De Sitter Space”; Balasubramanian and Kraus, “Spacetime and the Holographic Renormalization Group.”
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Balasubramanian et al., “Holographic Probes of Anti–De Sitter Spacetimes”; Heemskerk et al., “Holography From Conformal Field Theory.”
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Arkani-Hamed and Trnka, “The Amplituhedron.”
- 20.
Bern et al., “Fusing Gauge Theory Tree Amplitudes Into Loop Amplitudes.”
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Musser, G. (2017). Spacetime Is Doomed. In: Wuppuluri, S., Ghirardi, G. (eds) Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44418-5_17
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