The Non-Fundamentality of Spacetime: General Relativity, Quantum Gravity, and Metaphysics [Hardcover]

This book argues that our current best theories of fundamental physics are best interpreted as positing spacetime as non-fundamental. It is written in accessible language and largely avoids mathematical technicalities by instead focusing on the key metaphysical and foundational lessons for the fundamentality of spacetime.

This book combines novel, breakthrough contributions with insightful overviews of the state of the art in the foundations of spacetime.

Vera Matarese, University of Bern, Switzerland

Kian Salimkhani is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, and a member of the DFG research group Inductive Metaphysics. He mainly works on philosophy of physics, metaphysics, and general philosophy of science.

This book argues that our current best theories of fundamental physics are best interpreted as positing spacetime as non-fundamental. It is written in accessible language and largely avoids mathematical technicalities by instead focusing on the key metaphysical and foundational lessons for the fundamentality of spacetime.

According to orthodoxy, spacetime and spatiotemporal properties are regarded as fundamental structures of our world. Spacetime fundamentalism, however, faces challenges from speculative theories of quantum gravity  roughly speaking, the project of applying the lessons of quantum mechanics to gravitation and spacetime. This book demonstrates that the non-fundamentality of spacetime does not rely on speculative physics alone. Rather, one can give an interpretation of general relativity that supports some form of spacetime non-fundamentalism. The author makes the case for spacetime non-fundamentalism in three steps. First, he confronts the standard geometrical interpretation of general relativity with Brown and Pooleys dynamical approach to relativity theory. Secol³