Spacetime “Emergence”
Nick Huggett
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the general philosophical project of understanding the “emergence” of spacetime, how something apparently so basic to physics could have a physical explanation. The fundamental theories are proposed accounts of quantum spacetime: for example, loop quantum gravity, string theory, causal set theory, non-commutative geometry, and group field theory. One important strand of enquiry that philosophers have taken up concerns the way in which ordinary spacetime might be grounded in the non-spatiotemporal. The implications of emergent spacetime for traditional metaphysical views are only starting to be explored — but given that so many are tied to a classical conception of spacetime, it should be expected that there is a great deal to learn. The development of quantum mechanics then swung the pendulum again, since it allows effects not easily understood in terms of the local propagation of fields in spacetime: entanglement, and the Bohm-Aharanov effect, for instance.