Symmetry-breaking and zero-one laws

Abstract

Abstract We offer further evidence that discreteness of the sort inherent in a causal set cannot, in and of itself, serve to break Poincaré invariance. In particular we prove that a Poisson sprinkling of Minkowski spacetime cannot endow spacetime with a distinguished spatial or temporal orientation, or with a distinguished lattice of spacetime points, or with a distinguished lattice of timelike directions (corresponding respectively to breakings of reflection-invariance, translation-invariance, and Lorentz invariance). Along the way we provide a proof from first principles of the zero-one law on which our new arguments are based.