Stephen Wolfram

it's possible for an underlying microscopic theory to imply special relativity, to be able to derive it.

It's not something you put in as a, this is a, it's something where this other property, causal invariance, which is also the property that implies that there's a single thread of time in the universe.

It might not be the case.

That's what would lead to the possibility of an observer thinking that definite stuff happens.

Otherwise, you've got all these possible rewriting orders, and who's to say which one occurred?

But with this causal invariance property, there's a notion of a definite thread of time.

Oh, yeah.

No, no.

A fundamental level, all you've got is a bunch of nodes connected by hyper-edges or whatever.

So there's no time, there's no space.

That's right.

But the thing is that it's just like imagining, imagine you're just dealing with a graph.

And imagine you have something like a honeycomb graph where you have a bunch of hexagons.

That graph, at a microscopic level, it's just a bunch of nodes connected to other nodes.

But at a macroscopic level, you say that looks like a honeycomb lattice.

It looks like a two-dimensional manifold of some kind.

It looks like a two-dimensional thing.

If you connect it differently, if you just connect all the nodes one to another in kind of a sort of linked list type structure, then you'd say, well, that looks like a one-dimensional space.

But at the microscopic level, all these are just networks with nodes.

The microscopic level, they look like something that's like one of our sort of familiar kinds of space.