Abstract
General relativity and the standard model of particle physics remain the most fundamental physical theories enjoying robust experimental confirmation. The foundational assumptions of physics changed rapidly during the early development of these theories, but the challenges of their refinement and the exploitation of their explanatory power turned attention away from foundational issues. Deep problems and anomalous observations remain unaddressed. New theories such as string theory attempt to resolve these issues, but are presently untested. In this essay, I evaluate the foundational assumptions of modern physics and propose new physical principles. I reject the manifold structure of spacetime, the existence of an independent time parameter and static background structure, the symmetry interpretation of covariance, the commutativity of spacetime, and a number of related assumptions. The central new principle I propose is called the causal metric hypothesis. The classical version of this hypothesis states that the metric properties of spacetime, up to overall scale, arise from the binary relation generating the causal order. The quantum version states that the phases associated with congruence classes of directed paths in causal configuration space are determined by the causal relations of their constituent universes.
Benjamin F. Dribus