/sci/ - Science & Math

(cont'd)

While Newtonian gravity expressed the interaction of bodies in a basically acausal, yet simultaneous way, GR suggests that the bodies (represented by the stress-energy tensor) have an effect on the geometry of spacetime (the metric tensor), which then affects the bodies in turn (the geodetic equations). This might not be a problem, except for the fact that their exist valid solutions like the van Stocktum, Gödel, and Alcubierrie metrics allow you to create a circle of events which are still seperated by timelike intervals (closed timelike curves), which means you could have a seemingly paradoxical cyclic causality. To date, all responses to these metrics have been the suggestion of ad-hoc conjectures that invoke causality as some kind of universal force field, something which strikes me as desperate and unsound.

When one tries to natively combine the equations of relativity and QM, we get the timeless, acasual, and nonlocal Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This is presently interpreted as showing some essential incompatibility between GR and QM, but what if what that equation has been demonstrating, and we've been ignoring, is that this is precisely how the universe operates? That time, space, and therefore causality and locality, are merely emergent properties of laws which are have none of those things?

What would the implications be of ditching the reliance on causality? Is it even possible to make a coherent theory without it? Can we even prove that the universe is logically consistent in the first place?