Causality, quantum theory and cosmology

Two radically different views about time are possible. According to the first, the universe is three dimensional. It has a past and a future, but that does not mean it is spread out in time as it is spread out in the three dimensions of space. This view requires that there is an unambiguous, absolute, cosmic-wide “now” at each instant. According to the second view about time, the universe is four dimensional. It is spread out in both space and time—in space-time in short. Special and general relativity rule out the first view. There is, according to relativity theory, no such thing as an unambiguous, absolute cosmic-wide “now” at each instant. However, we have every reason to hold that both special and general relativity are false. Not only does the historical record tell us that physics advances from one false theory to another. Furthermore, elsewhere I have shown that we must interpret physics as having established physicalism—in so far as physics can ever establish anything theoretical. Physicalism, here, is to be interpreted as the thesis that the universe is such that some unified “theory of everything” is true. Granted physicalism, it follows immediately that any physical theory that is about a restricted range of phenomena only, cannot be true, whatever its empirical success may be. It follows that both special and general relativity are false. This does not mean of course that the implication of these two theories that there is no unambiguous cosmic-wide “now” at each instant is false. It still may be the case that the first view of time, indicated at the outset, is false. Are there grounds for holding that an unambiguous cosmic-wide “now” does exist, despite special and general relativity, both of which imply that it does not exist? There are such grounds. Elsewhere I have argued that, in order to solve the quantum wave/particle problem and make sense of the quantum domain we need to interpret quantum theory as a fundamentally probabilistic theory, a theory which specifies how quantum entities—electrons, photons, atoms—interact with one another probabilistically. It is conceivable that this is correct, and the ultimate laws of the universe are probabilistic in character. If so, probabilistic transitions could define unambiguous, absolute cosmic-wide “nows” at each instant. It is entirely unsurprising that special and general relativity have nothing to say about the matter. Both theories are pre-quantum mechanical, classical theories, and general relativity in particular is deterministic. The universe may indeed be three dimensional, with a past and a future, but not spread out in four dimensional space-time, despite the fact that relativity theories appear to rule this out. These considerations, finally, have implications for views about the arrow of time and free will.

A new dynamic process, dynamic incremental scale transition (DIST), is proposed that could resolve longstanding issues in physics and cosmology. The DIST process implies that general relativity (GR) is generalized to also model discrete scale adjustments that will not alter Einstein's GR equations. A cosmos model based on the DIST process better agrees with observations than the standard cosmological model, and resolves several enigmatic cosmological puzzles including the progression of time, the connection between GR and quantum theory and the origin of inertia.

Lovelock theory is a natural extension of the Einstein theory of general relativity to higher dimensions in which the first and second orders correspond, respectively, to general relativity and Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity. We present exact black hole solutions of $D\geq 4$-dimensional spacetime for first-, second-, and third-order Lovelock gravities in a string cloud background. Further, we compute the mass, temperature, and entropy of black hole solutions for the higher-dimensional general relativity and Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theories and also perform thermodynamic stability of black holes. It turns out that the presence of the Gauss-Bonnet term and/or background string cloud completely changes the black hole thermodynamics. Interestingly, the entropy of a black hole is unaffected due to a background string cloud. We rediscover several known spherically symmetric black hole solutions in the appropriate limits.

In a notorious paper published back in 1989, John Worrall sets forth a theoretical framework which has been labeled as the “best of both worlds” within the realist/anti-realist debate over the import of scientific theories: Structural Realism. The basic idea is that of recovering the power of both the famous “nomiracle argument” – set forth by Putnam (1975) and providing a defense of scientific realism – and the counter-argument from the fallibility of scientific theories, grounded in old and new versions of anti-realism. According to Worrall, his new perspective allows to overcome the impasse emerging from the two opposing positions. The claim underlying this theoretical option is the following: despite the evolution of scientific theories – which often involves the obliteration of older ideas in favor of uprising and more sophisticated ones – what seems to be persisting through this process is the structure of the theoretical construes. In other words, even though the multitude of scientific theories may posit different and incompatible kinds of entities (such as in the well-known transition between Newtonian and Einsteinian General Relativity), all of these show isomorphic structures:

This thesis is dedicated to certain nonlocal aspects of conformal quantum field theories (CFTs). Two main directions are the study of CFTs on a particular globally-nontrivial spacetime corresponding to finite temperature, and the study of particular nonlocal CFT observables localized on light-rays. Specifically, we introduce bootstrap techniques for determining finite-temperature data of CFTs, and make novel predictions for the 2+1-dimensional Ising model. We propose the “stringy equivalence principle”, stating that coincident gravitational shocks commute, as a generalization of the strong equivalence principle of Einstein’s General Relativity that must hold in all consistent theories of gravity. We prove it in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes by studying light-ray operators in the holographically dual CFT. We also derive an operator product expansion (OPE) for light-ray operators in CFT, by which two light-ray operators on the same light-sheet can be expanded as a sum of single light-ray operators. Light-ray operators model detectors — such as calorimeters. We use the light-ray OPE to compute energy event shape observables suitable for conformal collider physics. An additional part of this thesis determines the low-energy vacua of two-dimensional maximal super-Yang-Mills theory, which describes the dynamics of stacks of D-strings in Type IIB string theory. By computing an invariant of the renormalization group (RG) flow from high to low energy — a modified thermal partition function named the refined elliptic genus — we prove the existence of multiple vacua, and identify the superconformal field theories capturing their dynamics. The vacua correspond to bound states of (p,q)-strings in Type IIB string theory. Our computation serves as a check of the strong-weak S-duality of the Type IIB string.

One of the main challenges in theoretical physics over the last five decades has been to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity into a theory of quantum gravity. However, such a theory has been proved to be hard to attain due to i) conceptual difficulties present in both the component theories (General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Theory); ii) lack of experimental evidence, since the regimes at which quantum gravity is expected to be applicable are far beyond the range of conceivable experiments. Despite these difficulties, various approaches for a theory of Quantum Gravity have been developed. In this thesis we focus on two such approaches: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Topos theoretic approach. The choice fell on these approaches because, although they both reject the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, their underpinning philosophical approach to formulating a quantum theory of gravity are radically different. In particular LQG is a rather conservative scheme, inheriting all the formalism of both GR and Quantum Theory, as it tries to bring to its logical extreme consequences the possibility of combining the two. On the other hand, the Topos approach involves the idea that a radical change of perspective is needed in order to solve the problem of quantum gravity, especially in regard to the fundamental concepts of `space' and `time'. Given the partial successes of both approaches, the hope is that it might be possible to find a common ground in which each approach can enrich the other.

The theory of special and general relativity causes a “schizophrenic” dilemma in physics. It undeniably provides mathematically correct values, but it is undeniably epistemologically wrong in many respects. Including the relativistic explanation of the gravitational “time dilation” and the curvature of light beams at the surfaces of large masses, the author demonstrates the illogical character of relativistic physics. When one thinks the relativistic explanations of gravitational time dilatation and of the curvature of light rays by masses through to the end, they lead to absurd and contradictory logical conclusions.

It is believed that soon after the Planck time, Einstein's general relativity theory should be corrected to an effective quadratic theory. Numerical solutions for the anisotropic generalization of the Friedmann "open" model $H^ 3$ for this effective gravity are given. It must be emphasized that although numeric, these solutions are exact in the sense that they depend only on the precision of the machine. The solutions are identified asymptotically in a certain way. It is found solutions which asymptote de Sitter space, Riemann flat space and a singularity. The question of isotropisation of an initially anisotropic Universe is of great importance in the context of cosmology. Although isotropisation is not directly discussed in this present work, we show that sufficiently small anisotropies, do not increase indefinitely according to particular quadratic gravity theories. It can be understood as weak isotropisation, and we stress that this result is strongly dependent on initial conditions.

In recent years it seems that, by measuring the transverse Doppler effect in experiments with a Mössbauer source, we observe a higher blue-shift compared to that provided by the standard relativistic time dilation. If this experimental measure will be officially recognized by the scientific community, we believe that the correct explanation must be sought within Einstein's General Relativity theory. Having this in mind, the aim of this paper is to suggest a possible interpretation of the experimental results. We immediately emphasize that ours is only an idea and does not claim to be certainly the correct explanation in the case in which the experimental data will be confirmed.

Wormholes are tunnels connecting two different points in space-time. In Einstein's General Relativity theory, wormholes are expected to be filled by exotic matter, i.e., matter that does not satisfy the energy conditions and may have negative density. We propose, in this paper, the achievement of wormhole solutions with no need for exotic matter. In order to achieve so, we consider quadratic terms in the trace of the energy-momentum tensor as corrections to the effective energy-momentum tensor of the underlined theory of gravity. We show that by following this formalism, it is possible, indeed, to obtain non-exotic matter wormhole solutions.

The happiest thought of Einstein's life

It is shown that for a very general class of space-times, the componentsR of the curvature tensor determine the metric components up to a constant conformal factor. This general class contains most of those cases which are usually considered to be interesting from the point of view of Einstein's general relativity theory. The connection between the above result and the existence of proper curvature collineations is given.

Conformal transformations are frequently used tools in order to study relations between various theories of gravity and Einstein's general relativity theory. In this paper we discuss the rules of these transformations for geometric quantities as well as for the matter energy-momentum tensor. We show the subtlety of the matter energy-momentum conservation law which refers to the fact that the conformal transformation “creates” an extra matter term composed of the conformal factor which enters the conservation law. In an extreme case of the flat original spacetime the matter is “created” due to work done by the conformal transformation to bend the spacetime which was originally flat. We discuss how to construct the conformally invariant gravity theories and also find the conformal transformation rules for the curvature invariants R2, RabRab, RabcdRabcd and the Gauss-Bonnet invariant in a spacetime of an arbitrary dimension. Finally, we present the conformal transformation rules in the fashion of the duality transformations of the superstring theory. In such a case the transitions between conformal frames reduce to a simple change of the sign of a redefined conformal factor.

Kerr black holes are among the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's general relativity theory. These rotating massive astrophysical objects drag and intermix their surrounding space and time, deflecting and phase-modifying light emitted nearby them. We have found that this leads to a new relativistic effect that imposes orbital angular momentum onto such light. Numerical experiments, based on the integration of the null geodesic equations of light from orbiting point-like sources in the Kerr black hole equatorial plane to an asymptotic observer, indeed identify the phase change and wavefront warping and predict the associated light-beam orbital angular momentum spectra. Setting up the best existing telescopes properly, it should be possible to detect and measure this twisted light, thus allowing a direct observational demonstration of the existence of rotating black holes. Since non-rotating objects are more an exception than a rule in the Universe, our findings are of fundamental importance.

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