EPR Paradox as Evidence for the Emergent Nature of Spacetime

Abstract

After a providing a review of the EPR paradox which draws a distinction between what is here called the locality and the influence paradoxes, this paper presents a qualitative overview of a framework recently introduced by this author in which spacetime is assumed to emerge from areatime. Two key assumptions from this framework allow one to make the notion of quantum effects originating from ‘outside’ spacetime intelligible. In particular, this framework assumes that until a quantum object is measured, it does not actually exist in spacetime and that there are connections between quantum particles in areatime which are independent of metric relations in spacetime. These assumptions are then shown to permit one to conceptually understand both the locality and the influence paradoxes, and lead to the overall conclusion that spacetime is emergent in the sense that a very large number of discrete events which correspond to ‘measurements’ in quantum mechanics aggregate to give rise on a large scale to the apparently smooth reality we experience in our daily lives.