SPACE, TIME AND EMERGENCE

Thomas Cabaret
July 28, 2015

Proof of concept Version 1.4

Abstract
This is a small personal brainstorming about the notions of space
and time and more generally about emergence of properties. Although
some short reminders are present, it is advised to understand, at least
qualitatively, the concepts of special and general relativity.

1 Emergence hides the true nature of things

Here’s a little analogy to illustrate some mechanisms related to emergent phe-
nomena and highlight some issues of experimentation. Imagine that, as scien-
tists, we study single-voice melodies. For us, the notion of tone, at our scale,
is fully defined at any date on the time line. It even seems that talking about
tone over a given interval of time has no meaning because it may well vary
meanwhile. Melodies have always fit in our two-dimensional model: a temporal
dimension, a tonal dimension, and our object is fully defined. But of course the
reality is quite different : what we perceive as tone is a rapid variation of some
potential and so, paradoxically, this notion that seemed at first glance defined
punctually in time, only makes sense on a sufficiently large time interval. The
smaller this interval is, the more blurred the notion will be. During their quest
of understanding of what a melody is fundamentally made, scientists will be
split into two categories: those who will be damned forever glued in paradox
trying to make the microscopic fit into their empiric macroscopic model, and
the others who will smell something is terribly wrong and try to reconsider their
approach.

2 A quick reminder of the historical background

Historically, the first approach to understand the laws of nature consisted in
seeing a frame of space, and a frame of time, each independent of the other and
both defined in absolute terms. We can then populate such a structure with
objects and submit it to various laws...

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Later on, the revolution was to realize that neither space nor time was ab-
solute but relative to the observer. It was also highlighted that we could not
treat space and time independently but had to see them as a single structure:
space-time. So today we have this structure of space-time that we can populate
with objects as before, having always, this time with respect to a given observer,
positions, trajectories, etc... That’s the framework of special relativity.
Then later on, with general relativity, it was realized that this frame of space-
time was not homogeneous and could be affected by the matter populating it.
Gravity is nowadays not seen as a force but as an illusion created by the local
non-euclidean characteristics of space-time. The objects move straight on, but
in a gravitational field that ”straight” is just curved. Thus we have our space-
time frame that drives the evolution of the objects populating it, and objects
that change the metric of space-time in which they register. Space-time acts on
matter, matter acts on space-time.

3 An information-based view of the universe

The aim of this brainstorming is to show a different way to consider space-
time and reality. At first, it may be hard to reconsider what common sense
usually brings: space-time is usually seen as something absolute existing in
itself, infinitely divisible. But remember the different steps of the historical
background. Each time something appeared at first absolute and independent
it eventually revealed itself to be relative and linked to other concepts. Now
ask yourself some questions: what meaning can be given to space-time
at places and dates at which no event occurs? What meaning can
be given to an object outside the way it interacts with everything
else? Asking this type of question is the beginning of what we can call an
information-based view of the universe.
It is quite natural not to like this type of questions when we are first con-
fronted to it. It’s because at our scale the way things behave does not truly
highlight the way they are linked together. If we see a stone on a road, we know
it exists in itself, and unconsciously we consider it to be independent with the
rest of the universe. And in some way this is true for us, as we have never seen
any remarkable effect of this object that can affect our life. But it’s not the true
nature of things. If you consider it with a scientific point of view, you’ll see this
stone as a huge aggregate of particles involving a huge number of interactions. If
we look deeper, we know with quantum mechanics that all those interactions do
not appear in a analog but in a digital fashion. Thus, they define countable
events. This is true as well internally than externally with the rest of uni-
verse. In real life almost everything interacts heavily, directly or indirectly and
in both ways. Everything even through high distance and emptiness is heavily
interacting in our world: a cell of your brain right now will eventually interact
indirectly with a rock on the moon. If you try to find something that interacts
only in one direction you will get some pathological structures like black holes,
which by definition are clearly far from what we can call the general case. And

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so, keeping all that in mind ask yourself the same questions: what meaning can
be given to space-time at places and dates at which no event occurs? What
meaning can be given to an object outside the way it interacts with everything
else?
What is powerful with this information-based approach is that it can reduce
the number of assumptions we need to describe reality because if some concepts
do not exist in themselves it means they can be deduced, induced, defined by
only relationships. They can emerge. That is what we will try to illustrate for
the specific case of space-time in the rest of this brainstorming.

4 Implementation of the concept

So we will totally forget for now on the notion of space-time. Let’s imagine
the universe as a set of objects of any kind, those objects having relationships
among themselves. There is no support, no space, no time, the placement of
those objects in this universe is entirely defined by the relations which bind
them together. We are not making any claim here, we are defining a base for
a thought experiment. We will build a system, trying to minimise the number
of assumptions, and we will try to build from it something that looks like our
reality, or try to see what qualitative family of mechanisms can lead to what we
see. So the reader is invited to really make this effort of building mentaly step
by step what we will talk about and keep an opened mind.

We will now introduce an implementation of a fundamental level. It is

certainly far from being the only one but it’s a good way to get the general
idea. In this implementation there are only events and causal relationships
among themselves. This let us with a directed-graph structure without cycles
in which the nodes are events and edges are the causality. This structure exists
by itself with no need of a supporting frame. This can be seen as a way to
abstract the pieces of information in the universe, seeing what exists
as pure information and nothing else.

Above is a representation of this lattice. The circles represent events, the arrows
represent fundamental causal interactions. We will show that with only this, a
space time structure with stunning properties emerges for each internal observer.
.

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Definition of fundamental object: we will call fundamental object any string

of events. The concept must seem natural: an object is defined by the events
that make up its life. These events are linked through at least one common
information.

Definition of proper time of a fundamental object: This is the number

of events in the string from a reference event of the same string.

It can be interesting to highlight that it is here quite natural to define

the time in relation to a structure and not globally. When you want to
measure the time in real life this is exactly what we do: we look at a particular
system of small size to quantify some physical phenomena, either a watch, a
hourglass or cesium atoms. It is much more natural to see time defined locally
rather than in an absolute structure overseeing everything. With the previous
definition, a fundamental object has a dating system to measure elapsed time
for him.

Definition of causal echo: Is called causal echo any finite string, starting
from a basic reference fundamental object, going through a target fundamental

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object, and returning to the first fundamental object. It is just a question of

interpretation of the elements of the lattice depending on the context. In the
figure above the blue line is a causal echo when considered from the perspective
of the fundamental object of the left.

Definition of fundamental distance to another object: This is the dura-

tion in elapsed proper time of the reference object of the causal echo to the other
object with the earliest return (See diagram above). Again this definition must
seem natural: the only meaning a fundamental object can give to the notion
of distance to another object is the elapsed proper time to get an echo of the
information coming from himself and interacting with the target at some point.
When this is short the target object appears/is by definition close. When this
is longer the target object appears/is by definition more distant.

For a fundamental object and particular date, it is difficult to define the dis-
tance to another fundamental object. But at macroscopic time scales it appears
that the relative distance is quite well defined at any time. We can also highlight
that distance and time are naturally expressed in the same units.

Misinterpretation: We are not talking about establishing a protocol to

measure the distance at the fundamental level, because this notion does not ex-
ist. Neither it is a question of deciding to send signals to a target. There is no
assumption of control over what happens. We are talking about a massive and
erratic network of interactions and in this context what we are doing is defining
a notion of distance, building up and making emerge something that behaves
like what we want. As said in the introduction, keep in mind that in real life
everything interacts heavily, directly or indirectly and in both ways.

If we summarize what we just did, we had events and causality, we defined

objects, their relationships and without any other assumption, without including
them in a space-time, we have now a draft from an internal point of view of
this notion of space-time. In other words, in this way of seeing things we do
not have on one hand objects and on the other hand space-time but this pure
relational lattice and what emerges from it.

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5 Coutinous and dimensional aspect

There are some misinterpretations to avoid. After introducing the concept we
try naturally to apply it to our reality and we imagine some kind of 4D mesh.
But this is not the right way to see it, as it makes the assumption of some kind
of global structural constraint which is not necessary and is what we tried to
avoid. What we need to understand is that no event has a real position nor
date. Consider the following structure:

At a small-scale this structure is more or less 2D and discrete, at an higher scale

this appears one-dimensional and continuous. At high-scale all macro-event can
be given an accurate position on this emerging dimension, but a low-level notion
of position on this 1D axis cannot be defined accurately. For example, red events
have no order at the fundamental level, but this would not make any sense if
we tried to make them fit into what emerges at high scale.
This is how we must see the mesh of the relational approach: it’s locally
defined, governed by some local laws, and it is such that at a macroscopic scale
large enough this 3D world we know emerges. So it is very likely that our
common measurables of position and date have their usual meaning
in terms of macro-event, and that at lower scales these measurables
become fuzzy defined and lose their meaning. As it has been mentioned
the gain of seeing things like that is not having any need of assumption at the
global level on the structure of our lattice, and no need of laws that would
supervised the whole reality.

6 Special relativity and analogy

If we had to summarize the principle of relativity in a few lines we would say:
For any observer the laws of nature are the same. There is, pursuant to this
principle, no way to distinguish frames of reference among themselves, and
therefore nothing is moving and nothing is motionless.
With the relational approach we can see that all of this comes naturally
because space-time itself is defined by emergence relatively to the objects by
their relationships. Each object locally defines its own front of evolu-
tion and its own metric. There is no reason for a fundamental object, or a

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macroscopic object, to observe different physical laws or to be able to declare

that one of them is more moving or motionless than another as by nature this
type of emergence defines everything relatively.
We must keep in mind that proper time is necessarily relative to a reference
fundamental object and therefore not absolute, and that the emerging funda-
mental distance is also relative to this reference object. In summary: we
have time and space both locally and subjectively defined and nat-
urally expressed in the same units. All this reminds qualitatively,
the description of reality in the relativity theory, and with really few
assumptions.

Relativity is a kind of symmetry, it is very difficult to imagine how it could

emerge at high level without an equivalent very close to ground level. If we
were talking about uniformity or isotropic properties both can easily emerge
from non-uniform and non-isotropic environments as long as we are looking at
something erratic enough and big enough. But it’s much harder to make emerge
the symmetry of relativity. By defining space and time relatively to the objects
this symmetry comes naturally.

7 Emergence of Lorentzian properties

Let’s first look deeper in the notion of fundamental distance and consider the
following diagram.

It’s a schematic representation of a fundamental object and two minimal causal

echoes defining the distance to another object.

Misinterpretation: The object chosen as an observer does not decide

whether to send signals or not. This fundamental object is dealing with massive
interactions, existing despite itself, that define a distance and thus how its real-
ity projects.

Lemme 1: Sent and received signals of several minimal causal echoes, each
associated to the definition of a distance, leave and return in the same order.

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Indeed, if the echoes crossed like in the figure above at least one of them would
not be minimal in proper time and is therefore not a measure of the fundamental
distance. Above left, the red echo is shorter in proper time than black echo issued
from the same date. The same applies to the case of right. This leads to lemme
1. Thus if we consider all the fundamental distance causal echoes during the
life-time of our reference object they are strictly ordered. It means that from the
reference object point of view you can say which fundamental distance measure
comes before another.
But still we have the problem of the fuzziness: we have all those measures
of the fundamental distance to the other object, we can strictly order them, but
we cannot say accurately when one of them is performed. At high scale, when
the interval related to the measure is small, the beginning, the end or any date
in the interval of the measure is almost the same date. To be able to manipulate
this concept at any scale we need to decide to which accurate date we attach
a measure of the fundamental distance and we will decide to attach it to the
middle of the interval of the measure. This might seem arbitrary but it gives
a consistent order of the measures compared to the order among the intervals
and it’s the most balanced choice.

It’s a schematic representation of a fundamental object and two minimal causal

echoes defining the fundamental distances (by definition expressed in elapsed
proper time), d1 and d2 , to another object. Between the perception of the two
distances we have an elapsed proper time of ∆t. e is elapsed proper time be-
tween the reception of the first echo and the emission of the second echo. The
scheme is doubled to account for e positive and e negative.

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If we consider the apparent speed of the target fundamental object for our
reference fundamental object we have:

d mind
1− 1 1− 1
∆d d2 −d 1 d2 d2
v = ∆t = =2 ≤2 mind +e
d1 d2 d1 +e e
2 + 2 +e 1+
d2
+
d2 1+ 1 + e
d2 d2
With the constraints coming from Lemme 1:
d2 > −e and d1 > −e
We are interested in the maximum apparent velocity our object can perceive:
the vmax we get when we change d1 , d2 and e inside the lemme 1 constraints.

• When e ≥ 0 mind = 0 and v ≤ 2 12e ≤ 2

1 1+
d2

1+ e
d2
• When e < 0 mind = −e and v ≤ 2 ≤2
1 1+ e
d2
Thus, by definition, this reference fundamental object never measures a radial
velocity over 2 units in the system. In other words: from an internal point
of view the causal apparent speed cannot exceed a given constant
and this constant maximum apparent radial velocity is shared by all
fundamental objects. It is quite amazing to see how this first quantitative
result seems to perfectly stick to reality. Some might think that in our definitions
of time, distance and speed the snake is biting its own tail, and that’s exactly the
point: it’s precisely because proper time and fundamental distance are linked
that dividing one by the other brings some constant.
As you may already be aware of, the fundamental distance is not enough to
provide us a real metric, it’s not even symmetric but it defines some kind of
really basic quantity with some interesting property, it defines the causal neigh-
borhood. But the way this quantity is defined from proper time and
the mechanism above that drafts some Lorentzian properties make us
believe that this quantity plays a central role in a complete emerging
metric. It highly encourages that a full metric can be derived from this quantity.

Misinterpretation: It is quite possible for a fundamental object to mea-

sure velocities infinitely large but those will be phase velocities and not causal
velocities. The property we have shown comes from the causal echoes order prop-
erty which exists only because the reference object and the one it is looking at,
both contain a causal string. It is this property coupled with our defined emer-
gent topology, in which space and time are derived from a common structure,
that makes maximum apparent velocity intrinsic to such universe. This is the
subjective speed information cannot exceed.

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8 General relativity and analogy

As mentioned previously, general relativity describes the two-way action be-
tween space-time and matter. Gravitation is not really a force in the usual
sense but a local curvature in space-time, a local change in the metric. But gen-
eral relativity postulates separately the existence of these two concepts of matter
and space-time, and connects them with a few equations. If we look at this in
the light of the relational approach, from the moment the space-time is an
emerging concept defined from objects, it is natural to have both re-
lated and that any local non uniformity of the mesh, a larger density
of interactions for example, affects the metric of space-time emerging
from it. In other words, from the inside, it is logical to observe a dif-
ferent local topology of space-time around where the macro-objects
give the illusion of being. The relational approach allows to express
the components of the universe and space-time in which they occur
in the same formalism. The link observed experimentally between these two
notions thus comes naturally.

9 Quantum decoherence and analogy

Quantum decoherence is the phenomenon that brings down the vagueness of
measurable when we start to interact with a particle. Ie when left alone, the
particles do not appear to have actual position, but when we interact with, they
acquire one.

Misinterpretation: an empiric mind will think very quickly that this is not
the fact of interacting that gives value to something like the position but that the
particle always had one, it was just that we did not know it. But this empiric
mind would be wrong: there is nowadays a wide range of experiments showing
that measurables before actual measurement have no defined value.

But we can be comforted by the pure relational approach, firstly because it

gives a meaning to ”having no value” (even for a measurable like position!),
since this quantity is inapplicable at small scale and secondly because it seems
to have the power to explain the phenomenon of quantum decoherence: the
more you interact with things, the denser the causal local mesh will be by
definition. High-scale macroscopic values sticking to our macroscopic standards
will emerge. It can also be highlighted that at such scale we cannot control
accurately how we interact. Attempting a measure triggers an avalanche
of interactions around the measure itself that makes violently emerge
a consistent apparent position of macroscopic objects.

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The diagram above shows an illustration of the concept: when there is not much
interaction the datation on the emerging 1D of red dots are unclear, which comes
first? Adding interactions brings out a more precise one-dimensional coherent
projection: green events are ordered. We strongly believe that our quantum
decoherence and the wave aspect of particles is related to this family of phe-
nomenon. In a nutshell we gave a meaning to quantum fuziness: ”hav-
ing not enough or not consistent interactions to projects the object
in our macroscopic reality” and we gave a meaning to a measure:
”adding the right number and type of interactions to be able to do
it.”. Interactions due to the measure itself are part of the macroscopic value
that emmerges. The act of measuring also puts the particle in a very specific
schema of interactions with the rest of the universe that gives by nature pri-
ority to interactions with other particles that can successfully be projected in
our macroscopic reality (detector, etc...) and thus ensures the particle itself
can also be successfully projected. We can locate things when we relate
them to other things we can locate. The natural successfull projection of
every day life objets is a statistical phenomenon influencing the relationships
they have together. We can also highlight that those mechanisms shows that it
is possible for a macroscopic beeing to be doomed to see pure ran-
domness (not only statistical) from his point of view and yet be in a
fully deterministic universe.

10 Matter as a synchronized state

According to the theory of relativity, when objects stand still relatively to each
other it is possible to speak of absolute time for the overall system. In this case, it
is quite logical to project the evolution of the system on a single reference clock,
that is what we do in every-day life. Conversely, when the relative movements
of the objects are important, this approximation is no longer possible.
The relational approach allows us to say the same thing but in a way that
seems more natural. Indeed we can see that if we consider a set of objects, they
do not have any reason to share a single time frame, but that when they are
subject to some form of synchronization, then by definition of the fundamental
distance they appear motionless relatively to each other. In other words, we can
consider each object as a fundamental oscillator, which through con-
stant and symmetrical causal echoes with other fundamental objects
form a synchronized aggregate perceived at high level as a stable ma-

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terial. We are not adding here anything new it’s just another interesting way of
seeing things: components are not synchronized because they form something
stable, they appear stable because they are causally synchronized.
We would like to mention here an interpretation of the inertial mass of a
body to highlight how rich our approach can be and leads to various mecha-
nisms looking at first glance not related to each other. By seeing a body as a
synchronized aggregate as mentionned above and if the motion is itself what
we percieve from some aspect of this synchronisation, from causal exchanges
between the object and the rest of the universe, it comes with it the density of
those exchanges. An object with a high density of internal interactions will be
harder to unsynchronize from its environment, will thus be harder to accelerate
and by definition will have a higher inertial mass. If we see the mass this way
it means that this one will not be always an extensive property of the body:
the addition of two bodies would sometimes have a higher inertial mass than
the sum of both bodies intertial mass. Thus because the two bodies have a
part of their individual interactions with each of their outside in fact between
themselves, internally. That is what we observe experimentally, a part of the
inertial mass of different particle aggregates disappear when we consider each
particle independently, that’s the case for quarks inside protons and at a higher
level for protons in atoms. In some way it’s exactly what we have just described.
Even if it remains only roughly qualitative we can express with this approach:
space, time, motion and inertial mass in the same formalism.

11 Quantum tunneling and analogy

Tunneling refers to the property of a quantum object to cross a potential barrier
even if its energy is less than the minimum energy required to overcome this
barrier. A common analogy is to imagine a ball thrown at a given speed to cross
a bump. In the classical world if the bump is too high the ball never crosses it
and rolls away in the other direction. In the quantum world we may observe
the ball ending up on the other side of the relief, even without having sufficient
energy to cross the summit.
Again all this comes naturally considering emergent phenomenon of the re-
lational approach: the macroscopic space is only a limit at high level
of the underlying lattice. Thus, continuity, infinite divisibility and
the number of dimensions are emerging concepts. There is no more
paradox if we do not restrict what we see to fit in the space as we
know it at our scale. It is not that the particles have miraculous means to
take a shortcut, but that the macroscopic topology is an illusion.

12 Quantum entanglement and analogy

If we try to see our common space-time like the emergent phenomenon dictated
by the relational approach we face a problem: what do the laws of such a

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universe look like? When there is no space to support it, it’s quite tricky to see
how things might be related. In fact a relational lattice induces two topologies:
the one we have introduced which emerges at high scale, and a more basic one
which just derives from the number of fundamental causal relations between
events, in other words the number of arcs in the graph to link them. If we
postulate local laws in the mesh, the flavor is to have laws describing how to
knit the mesh based on the current causal neighborhood. It’s possible to
see in the emergent topology two events close to each other but that
are quite distant in terms of number of causal relations to link them
together. And the reverse is also true: two events might be projected
as quite distant in the emergent topology but linked by a very small
number of causal relations. So as long as two events share a common past
small enough in term of number of causal relations they are still part of the
same loop of the knit. Despite they might appear distant to each other in the
emergent topology they will induce some kind of correlation. When we want
to highlight the entanglement phenomenon, we isolate particles, which is
exactly equivalent to keep both measure events at small distance in
terms of number of causal interactions. We make those pair of events in
the same loop of the knit and when this loop is closed we observe this correlation.

13 Conclusion
What have just been said is not claiming anything, it’s a brainstorming, a
collection of obvious things that put together seem to bring unexpected powerful
explanations. What have we done? We have built a system, trying to minimize
the number of assumptions, and we have tried to build from it something that
looks like our reality, or tried to see what qualitative family of mechanisms can
lead to what we see. What we have done in our approach is forgetting a global
structure of space-time in which we would have placed events. We considered
only events and their causal relationships, based on the suggestion that, except
information and events, nothing needs to exist. This leads us to the construction
by emergence of a space-time we could observe in such a universe and we try to
highlight that basic emergence mechanisms naturally lead to:
• the subjective nature of space and time
• the link between space and time
• the link between space-time and it’s content
• some draft of Lorentzian property of space-time
Then we tried to open this to quantum phenomenon to highlight that same
mechanisms also lead to:
• an interpretation of the fuzziness of measurables
• an interpretation of the behavior of measure

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This model can even explain and give a meaning to a number of dimensions
depending of the scale at which we look. We would like to enrich this approach
on the mathematical point of view. There is probably a lot of new branches
to explore in the macroscopic topology of massive graphs which can include
statistic behavior etc... We could also try to see if on the physical point of view
we don’t know enough elementary interactions to build massive statistical causal
lattice of them and study their topological properties at high scales. Nowadays,
the theory describing macroscopic space and time is particularly clear but leads
to a theory describing quantum behaviors (in term of macroscopic space and
time) particularly complex. Have we tried the other way? Have we tried to
get rid of the notions of macroscopic space and time in a quantum theory to
get something particularly clear from which we could express our macroscopic
space and time? This would of course lead to a much more complex macroscopic
theory but we have strong reasons to be curious about what it will bring with
it.

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