The Project

The SNSF Starting Grant is founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It will run from September 2023 to August 2028.

You’ll find below a brief description of the project.

Understanding the nature of space, time and causation is widely regarded as key to answering long-standing questions: is time real, and if so, how does it relate to change, causation and material objects? Does space exist over and above the objects around us? How does time differ from space? These questions were already present in the writings of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, to name but a few of the grandfathers of the debates that continue to rage nowadays. As scientific knowledge has expanded, these debates have naturally evolved over the centuries. However, this evolution has undergone a dramatic change in the last few decades. Indeed, recent scientific advances herald nothing less than a conceptual revolution with the stunning idea that space and time are not, fundamentally, real (Huggett and Wüthrich 2013, forthcoming; Baron and Miller 2015a; Crowther 2018).

This revolution comes from quantum gravity, a network of research programmes in theoretical physics that aim at developing a novel and more explanatory framework for weaving together the knowledge from our current best and most fundamental physical theories: the general theory of relativity and quantum physics (Cao, 2001; Weinstein and Rickles, 2020). These research programmes virtually all imply the revolutionary idea that some properties usually considered as the hallmarks of space and time, such as spatial distances or temporal order, do not exist fundamentally and emerge from a more fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure. Questions about the coherence and plausibility of the non-fundamentality of space and time have received a great deal of attention in the last decade, and many physicists and philosophers nowadays regard this view as a plausible philosophical consequence of the physics of quantum gravity.

However, to fully understand the emergence of space and time and its philosophical implications, we must also account for the causal relations that seem to structure the natural world, and enable human beings to interact causally with their environment.
Indeed, the non-fundamentality of space and time seems to stand in the way of a straightforward analysis of causal relations in terms of causes and effects, located in space and time in temporal sequences. This raises the question of how to reconceptualize causation in a non-spatiotemporal world.

Important as it is, causation has not yet been fully documented and investigated in the context of quantum gravity: to date, only a few preliminary studies have been carried out (Baron and Miller 2014, 2015a; Tallant, 2019; Cinti and Sanchioni 2021). The project aims to fill this gap by articulating and evaluating various conceptions of causation compatible with a fundamentally non-spatiotemporal world. This requires to put to test two alternatives hypotheses. Either (i) space and time emerge from a more fundamental, non-spatiotemporal, structure made of causal relations, entailing the existence of a phenomenon of non-spatiotemporal causation; or (ii) causation also fails to exist at the fundamental level and emerges with space and time.

The two hypotheses will be investigated both on conceptual grounds and in the context of specific research programmes in physics. The conceptual analysis will be carried out in relation to three popular approaches to the nature of causation: the regularity theory, interventionism and conserved quantity theories. The case studies will include both specific approaches to quantum gravity—string theory, loop quantum gravity and causal set theory—and quantum-gravity-based cosmological models: eternal inflation, loop quantum cosmology and Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology.

Scientific Committee

Augustin Baas
Fay Dowker
Richard Dawid
Géraldine Haack
Leïla Haegel
Daniele Oriti
Carlo Rovelli