Constructing an interval of Minkowski space from a causal set

Abstract

A criticism sometimes made of the causal set quantum gravity program is that there is no practical scheme for identifying manifoldlike causal sets and finding embeddings of them into manifolds. A computational method for constructing an approximate embedding of a small manifoldlike causal set into Minkowski space (or any spacetime that is approximately flat at short scales) is given, and tested in the 2 dimensional case. This method can also be used to determine how manifoldlike a causal set is, and conversely to define scales of manifoldlikeness.