Daniele Oriti has answered that question
marcus said:
what do you think of the new AJL paper
...
does spinfoam, as you see it, tie into this?
I just saw that the genuine (not substitute) Oriti has answered the question
asked here about the relation of his "causal" spinfoam to the
Simplicial Gravity: Dynamical Triangulation approach of Ambjorn Jurkiewicz Loll.
today oriti posted this
http://arxiv.org/gr-qc/0412035
The Feynman propagator for quantum gravity: spinfoams, proper time, orientation, causality and timeless-ordering
and look on page 8:
---quote oriti---
Notice that, if such a relationship is found, not only we would have strenghtened the argument for the validity of our constuction and paved the way for further developments, but we would have also obtained,
as a side result (!), the first definition to be found in the literature, to the best of our knowledge, of a proper time expression for the action of simplicial gravity, that reduces to the Regge action when the additional variable is integrated out.
Another application of the proper time formalism could be the issue of Wick rotation in spin foam models, and more gnerally in quantum gravity, since it seems to be the right parameter in which to analytically continue the amplitudes to define an “euclideanized”model. Also, the generalised (proper time dependent) formulation of spin foam models could represent a new starting point for bridging the gap between spin foam models and other approaches to quantum gravity in which proper time plays a significant role, as for example the Lorentzian dynamical triangulations, that have achieved recently important results concerning the issue of continuum limit.
The causal models seem indeed to be the at the point of convergence of simplicial quantum gravity, dynamical triangulations and causal sets, in addition to canonical loop quantum gravity, and therefore represent the easiest context in which to analyse the relationships between all these approaches.
Finally, if the orientation-independent models can be understood as defining the matrix elements of the projector operator onto physical quantum gravity states, then an intriguing possibility is to interpret the new models as defining the matrix elements of an “evolution operator”, whose property could be studied to understand for example whether a notion of unitary evolution is feasible in Quantum Gravity and the “scattering”between quantum gravity perturbations, in absence of an external time coordinate, but with a clearly identified notion of causality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank gratefully Etera Livine and Florian Girelli for discussions and encouragement, and the organizers and staff of the DICE 2004 Workshop for a stimulating and truly enjoyable meeting.
----endquote---
I also want to quote from page 7
---quote oriti---
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Let us summarise what we have presented. We have discussed in which sense
causality may be thought of preexisting (!) time at the most fundamental level, and what notion of causality, interpreted as a ’seed’ from which the usual continuum notion of causality in terms of lightcone structure will emerge in a semiclassical approximation, can instead replace it in deep quantum gravity regime; we have argued that such a fundamental notion of causality can be implemented most naturally in a sum over-histories context; with the aim of implementing this idea in the spin foam context, we have linked the notion of causality with the orientation of the 2-complex on which the spin foam is based...
---endquote---
this has some strong basic ideas
that causality comes before time
that causality is linked to a geometric idea, namely the ORIENTATION of a simplicial complex.
have to go, back later
thanks to that Daniele, if he ever shows up here. really interesting paper