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arXiv · 1909.06070

Symmetry-breaking and zero-one laws

Fay Dowker·Rafael D. Sorkin
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Abstract

We offer further evidence that discreteness of the sort inherent in a causal set cannot, in and of itself, serve to break Poincar{\'e} invariance. In particular we prove that a Poisson sprinkling of Minkowski spacetime cannot endow spacetime with a distinguished spatial or temporal orientation, or with a distinguished lattice of spacetime points, or with a distinguished lattice of timelike directions (corresponding respectively to breakings of reflection-invariance, translation-invariance, and Lorentz invariance). Along the way we provide a proof from first principles of the zero-one law on which our new arguments are based.

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Fay Dowker, Rafael D. Sorkin. 2019-09-13. Symmetry-breaking and zero-one laws. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382%2Fab81cd

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