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I examine two claims that arise in Brown’s account of inertial motion. Brown claims there is something objectionable about the way in which the motions of free particles in Newtonian theory and special relativity are coordinated. Brown also claims that since a geodesic principle can be derived in Einsteinian gravitation, the objectionable feature is explained away. I argue that there is nothing objectionable about inertia and that while the theorems that motivate Brown’s second claim can be said to figure in (...) |
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I begin by reviewing some recent work on the status of the geodesic principle in general relativity and the geometrized formulation of Newtonian gravitation. I then turn to the question of whether either of these theories might be said to ``explain'' inertial motion. I argue that there is a sense in which both theories may be understood to explain inertial motion, but that the sense of ``explain'' is rather different from what one might have expected. This sense of explanation is (...) |
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Substantivalists believe that spacetime and its parts are fundamental constituents of reality. Relationalists deny this, claiming that spacetime enjoys only a derivative existence. I begin by describing how the Galilean symmetries of Newtonian physics tell against both Newton's brand of substantivalism and the most obvious relationalist alternative. I then review the obvious substantivalist response to the problem, which is to ditch substantival space for substantival spacetime. The resulting position has many affinities with what are arguably the most natural interpretations of (...) |
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In this article, we explore the heuristic power of the theoretical distinction between framework and interaction theories applied to the case of General Relativity. According to the distinction, theories and theoretical elements can be classified into two different groups, each with clear ontological, epistemic and functional content. Being so, to identify the group to which a theory belongs would suffice to know a priori its prospects and limitations in these areas without going into a detailed technical analysis. We make the (...) |
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It has been claimed, recently, that the fact that all the non-gravitational fields are locally Poincaré invariant and that these invariances coincide, in a certain regime, with the symmetries of the spacetime metric is miraculous in general relativity. In this paper I show that, in the context of GR, it is possible to account for these so-called miracles of relativity. The way to do so involves integrating the realisation that the gravitational field equations impose constraints on the behaviour of matter (...) |
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A classic problem in general relativity, long studied by both physicists and philosophers of physics, concerns whether the geodesic principle may be derived from other principles of the theory, or must be posited independently. In a recent paper [Geroch & Weatherall, "The Motion of Small Bodies in Space-Time", Comm. Math. Phys. ], Bob Geroch and I have introduced a new approach to this problem, based on a notion we call "tracking". In the present paper, I situate the main results of (...) |
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As Harvey Brown emphasizes in his book Physical Relativity, inertial motion in general relativity is best understood as a theorem, and not a postulate. Here I discuss the status of the "conservation condition", which states that the energy-momentum tensor associated with non-interacting matter is covariantly divergence-free, in connection with such theorems. I argue that the conservation condition is best understood as a consequence of the differential equations governing the evolution of matter in general relativity and many other theories. I conclude (...) |
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The status of the geodesic principle in General Relativity has been a topic of some interest in the recent literature on the foundations of spacetime theories. Part of this discussion has focused on the role that a certain energy condition plays in the proof of a theorem due to Bob Geroch and Pong-Soo Jang [“Motion of a Body in General Relativity.” Journal of Mathematical Physics16(1) (1975)] that can be taken to make precise the claim that the geodesic principle is a (...) |
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I critically discuss two dogmas of the “dynamical approach” to spacetime in general relativity, as advanced by Harvey Brown [Physical Relativity Oxford:Oxford University Press] and collaborators. The first dogma is that positing a “spacetime geometry” has no implications for the behavior of matter. The second dogma is that postulating the “Strong Equivalence Principle” suffices to ensure that matter is “adapted” to spacetime geometry. I conclude by discussing “spacetime functionalism”. The discussion is presented in reaction to and sympathy with recent work (...) |
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This contributed volume is the result of a July 2010 workshop at the University of Wuppertal Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies which brought together world-wide experts from physics, philosophy and history, in order to address a set of questions first posed in the 1950s: How do we compare spacetime theories? How do we judge, objectively, which is the “best” theory? Is there even a unique answer to this question? -/- The goal of the workshop, and of this book, (...) |
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