Associate Professor of Physics Seth Major has published an article he co-wrote in Journal of Mathematical Physics (Vol.48, No.3). Major's article, "On recovering continuum topology from a causal set," was written with Sumati Surya (Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India) and David Rideout (formerly of Hamilton College now at Imperial College, London).
The work concerns the approach to the quantum theory of spacetime based on single events in spacetime and their relations. Known as causal sets, the approach originated at Syracuse University. An important question that such discrete approaches to quantum gravity must address is how continuum features of spacetime can be recovered from the discrete substructure. We were able to show that we could
recover the correct "shape of space" (or topology) from a collection of events analogous to a sandwich of continuum spacetime.
The work concerns the approach to the quantum theory of spacetime based on single events in spacetime and their relations. Known as causal sets, the approach originated at Syracuse University. An important question that such discrete approaches to quantum gravity must address is how continuum features of spacetime can be recovered from the discrete substructure. We were able to show that we could
recover the correct "shape of space" (or topology) from a collection of events analogous to a sandwich of continuum spacetime.
