Deriving spacetime from first principles

Causal Dynamical Triangulation is a back-to-basics approach to nonperturbative, background-independent quantum gravity, which relies on few ingredients and initial assumptions, has few free parameters and crucially is amenable to numerical simulations. After putting the approach in context, we briefly describe its set-up and highlight some of its major, and sometimes unexpected findings. Prominent among them is the dynamical generation of a classical de Sitter universe from Planckian quantum fluctuations. (C) 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim