Emergence of Space-Time on the Planck Scale within the Scheme of Dynamical Cellular Networks and Random Graphs

Starting from the working hypothesis that both physics and the corresponding mathematics and in particular geometry have to be described by means of discrete concepts on the Planck-scale, one of the many problems one has to face in this enterprise is to find the discrete protoforms of the building blocks of our ordinary continuum physics and mathematics living on a smooth background, and perhaps more importantly find a way how this continuum limit emerges from the mentioned d...

We relate structurally dynamic cellular networks, a class of models we developed in fundamental space-time physics, to SDCA, introduced some time ago by Ilachinski and Halpern. We emphasize the crucial property of a non-linear interaction of network geometry with the matter degrees of freedom in order to emulate the supposedly highly erratic and strongly fluctuating space-time structure on the Planck scale. We then embark on a detailed numerical analysis of various large scal...

We develop a kind of pregeometry consisting of a web of overlapping fuzzy lumps which interact with each other. The individual lumps are understood as certain closely entangled subgraphs (cliques) in a dynamically evolving network which, in a certain approximation, can be visualized as a time-dependent random graph. This strand of ideas is merged with another one, deriving from ideas, developed some time ago by Menger et al, that is, the concept of probabilistic- or random me...

We discuss various aspects of the statistical formulation of the theory of random graphs, with emphasis on results obtained in a series of our recent publications.

It is proposed that gravity may arise in the low energy limit of a model of matter fields defined on a special kind of a dynamical random lattice. Time is discretized into regular intervals, whereas the discretization of space is random and dynamical. A triangulation is associated to each distribution of the spacetime points using the flat metric of the embedding space. We introduce a diffeomorphism invariant, bilinear scalar action, but no ``pure gravity'' action. Evidence...

The idea of a graph theoretical approach to modeling the emergence of a quantized geometry and consequently spacetime, has been proposed previously, but not well studied. In most approaches the focus has been upon how to generate a spacetime that possesses properties that would be desirable at the continuum limit, and the question of how to model matter and its dynamics has not been directly addressed. Recent advances in network science have yielded new approaches to the mech...

The Random Dynamics program is a proposal to explain the origin of all symmetries, including Lorentz and gauge invariance without appeal to any fundamental invariance of the laws of nature, and to derive the known physical laws in such a way as to be almost unavoidable. C. D. Froggatt and H. B. Nielsen proposed in their book Origin of Symmetries, that symmetries and physical laws should arise naturally from some essentially random dynamics rather than being postulated to be e...

Many real-world networks are embedded into a space or spacetime. The embedding space(time) constrains the properties of these real-world networks. We use the scale-dependent spectral dimension as a tool to probe whether real-world networks encode information on the dimensionality of the embedding space. We find that spacetime networks which are inspired by quantum gravity and based on a hybrid signature, following the Minkowski metric at small spatial distance and the Euclide...

Lecture notes given at the summer school ``Applications of random matrices to physics", Les Houches, June 2004.

Starting from the working hypothesis that both physics and the corresponding mathematics have to be described by means of discrete concepts on the Planck-scale, one of the many problems one has to face in this enterprise is to find the discrete protoforms of the building blocks of continuum physics and mathematics. A core concept is the notion of dimension. In the following we develop such a notion for irregular structures like (large) graphs and networks and derive a number ...