The empirical success of Special and General Relativity, and of theories that incorporate Relativistic symmetries, argues that the Relativistic account of space-time structure must approximate the truth. But on the other hand, the confirmed violations of Bell’s Inequality for experiments done at space-like separation equally appears to argue for some global foliation of space-time that does not appear in the Relativistic theory. In addition, certain problems concerning singularities in physics could be avoided if a space-time continuum were replaced by a discrete structure. The speaker will present some results from an approach to space-time he calls Full Discrete Space-Time and will show how approximately Relativistic Structure emerges from it in a quite unexpected way.
Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. Before joining NYU he was at Rutgers for a quarter century. He has a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Pittsburgh. His research interests lie primarily in the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic. His books include Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity (Blackwell), Truth and Paradox (Oxford), The Metaphysics Within Physics (Oxford), Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press), New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures (Oxford). Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory (Princeton). He is a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an ACLS fellow.
Webinar was recorded on September 8, 2022