Against Spacetime

Abstract

The notion of “location” physics really needs is exclusively the one of “detection at a given detector” and the time for each such detection is most primitively assessed as the readout of some specific material clock. The redundant abstraction of a macroscopic spacetime organizing all our particle detections is unproblematic and extremely useful in the classical-mechanics regime. But I here observe that in some of the contexts where quantum mechanics is most significant, such as quantum tunneling through a barrier, the spacetime abstraction proves to be cumbersome. And I argue that in quantum-gravity research we might limit our opportunities for discovery if we insist on the availability of a spacetime picture.