Davies & Gribbin (1992: 156-7):
The key question then becomes: how did space (strictly speaking, spacetime) come into existence. Many physicists, even today, balk at the puzzle, and are content to leave the matter to the theologians. But others argue that we must expect gravity, and hence spacetime, to be as much subject to the quantum factor as anything else in nature. In that case, if the spontaneous appearance of particles as a result of quantum effects no longer engenders surprise, why can we not entertain the prospect of the spontaneous appearance of spacetime? Developing a satisfactory description of this process at work would require a proper mathematical theory of quantum gravity, which is not yet available.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the spontaneous appearance of particles "as a result of quantum effects" is the instantiation of potential. The four dimensions of space-time constitute the measurable extent of such instances, with time being the dimension of the unfolding of a process mediated by a particle.
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