Tim Maudlin with an Interesting Idea About Relativity

Yesterday while listening to Tim Maudlin: Physics and Physical Phenomena I was struck by his idea that (1:40:09) he found he could do a path-counting procedure on 2+1 dimensional spacetime and recover an invariant that appeared like a relativistic interval.  Google go to great lengths to prevent people from accessing the text of the transcripts:

See On the Emergence of Both Relativistic Structure and a Global Foliation from Discrete Space-Time. I wondered why this didn't automatically apply to 3+1 dimensional spacetime too. I guess because he imagines a pre-existing lattice of some kind and the combinatorics are unmanageable. My thought was that maybe something like this would work inside a procedure which was effectively a completion process on a measure space as well. This would not have occurred to Maudlin because he's a realist! See David Albert Talking Complete Nonsense.

I found the above ERC talk he did on 2022:


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And here he is talking about the methodology of something he calls 'actual physics':

In slogan form: "A physical model describes what it is and what it does". 


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