About
I am an independent researcher working on my spare time in the philosophy and foundations of physics. My background is in engineering physics, and my work focuses on the ontological structure of spacetime, discrete causal processes, and the conceptual interface between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
My research develops the Discrete Gravitational Ontology (DGO) — a framework exploring how spacetime, geometry, quantum behaviour, and thermodynamic properties may arise from a fundamentally discrete, relational substrate.
What is the Discrete Gravitational Ontology?
Modern physics rests on two extraordinarily successful but conceptually conflicting theories:
- General relativity, describing spacetime as smooth geometry;
- Quantum mechanics, describing reality as discrete and probabilistic.
DGO started out from a unifying alternative:
Gravity is not a field acting inside spacetime, but the discrete relational fabric from which spacetime itself emerges.
At the microscopic level, reality consists of minimal gravitational connections – “pixels of existence” – that update at a fundamental rate c = ℓ₀ / τ₀, which appears macroscopically as the speed of light. From these updates emerge:
- the effective geometry of space and time,
- quantum-like amplitudes and statistics from path multiplicity and local competition,
- thermodynamic irreversibility from record growth,
- and energy–mass relations from the cost of prevented causal updates.
In the spherical sector, DGO leads to a spherical causal discretization, where spacetime is represented by expanding discrete shells. Deviations from the ideal shell populations reproduce small-sphere curvature relations, providing a combinatorial route to the Einstein–Hilbert limit and cosmological scaling laws.
Selected Publications
Latest update: The Foundations paper refines the core ontology. Probability and statistics are treated as emergent — arising from competition for finite update capacity and from the multiplicity of admissible microhistories — rather than as fundamental randomness.
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Foundations of a Discrete Relational Dynamics – From Finite Update Capacity to Classical and Quantum Structure NEW
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Spherical Causal Discretization: A Combinatorial Origin of Relativity, Quantum Behaviour, Thermodynamics, and Energy–Mass Equivalence
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The Physics of a Discrete Gravitational Ontology: From Relational Networks to Emergent Geometry and Thermodynamics
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Towards a Unified Physics: A Discrete Gravitational Ontology of Space, Time, and Quantum Reality
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The Universe as a Self-Learning Relational Network: Analogies between the Discrete Gravitational Ontology and Artificial Neural Systems
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Mathematical Foundations of the Discrete Gravitational Ontology (DGO)
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Irreversible Time as Quantum Self-Measurement
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Towards a Discrete Gravitational Ontology – A Conceptual Framework for Unifying Quantum Mechanics and Relativity
Origins and Development of DGO
The Discrete Gravitational Ontology emerged from nearly a decade of reflection on the unresolved tension between relativity and quantum mechanics. The project did not begin as formal research, but as an attempt to make sense of a deep conceptual inconsistency in modern physics.
Returning to Einstein’s original writings was a turning point: if gravity is the geometry of spacetime, perhaps the search for gravitons is misguided. Gravity might not be a particle or field within space, but the relational web that constitutes space itself.
The project has evolved through explicit iterations. An early slogan was “gravity is spacetime”. The current view is sharper: spacetime is the coarse-grained limit of a realized causal record, and the deeper layer is a discrete relational substrate where updates are constrained by finite capacity. In this picture, probabilistic physics is not fundamental — it is what coarse-graining looks like when many locally admissible updates must compete.
A simple diagram of discrete spacetime in a popular-science article (on work by Jonathan Oppenheim) sparked the key idea: what if gravity is fundamentally discrete and relational? Visual analogies – such as the Italian animation La Linea – helped shape the view of the universe as continuously “redrawn” from one discrete frame to the next.
To connect this with quantum theory, the framework now treats probability as effective: at the micro-level, local deterministic proposals compete for finite update capacity. At larger scales, the multiplicity of admissible microhistories and the competition for realization produce statistical behaviour and quantum-like amplitudes. Time’s arrow arises from irreversible acts of realization:
The universe does not record every possibility; it grows through irreversible actualization.
With the help of symbolic and numerical tools, these ideas were gradually sharpened into a concrete model: a discrete network of gravitational relations evolving according to causal update rules. Dual discreteness – spatial “pixels” and temporal “frames” – connects naturally to Planck-scale quantities and to structural analogies with artificial neural networks.
Step by step, this led to a unified ontology in which:
- finite update capacity and relational realization form the primitive substrate,
- statistical behaviour and quantum-like amplitudes emerge from competition and path multiplicity,
- spacetime geometry arises as a large-scale coarse-grained limit,
- gravity appears as an emergent geometric response of the coarse-grained record,
- and time is the record of irreversible relational actualizations.
Contact
I welcome thoughtful critique, questions, and collaboration proposals related to spacetime ontology, discrete causal models, quantum gravity, and the foundations of physics.
Email: bjorn@bwn.se
ORCID:
0009-0001-0919-3246