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  1. I ain’t afraid of no ghost.John Dougherty - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):70-84.
    This paper criticizes the traditional philosophical account of the quantization of gauge theories and offers an alternative. On the received view, gauge theories resist quantization because they feature distinct mathematical representatives of the same physical state of affairs. This resistance is overcome by a sequence of ad hoc modifications, justified in part by reference to semiclassical electrodynamics. Among other things, these modifications introduce "ghosts": particles with unphysical properties which do not appear in asymptotic states and which are said to be (...)
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  • Not Another Brick in the Wall: an Extensional Mereology for Potential Parts.Ryan Miller - manuscript
    Part is not a univocal term. Uses of parthood and composition that do not obey any supplementation principle have a long philosophical tradition and strong support from contemporary physics. We call such uses potential parts. This paper first shows why potential parts are important and incompatible with supplementation, then provides a formal mereology for such parts inspired by the path-integral approach to quantum electrodynamics.
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  • “The language of Dirac’s theory of radiation”: the inception and initial reception of a tool for the quantum field theorist.Markus Ehberger - 2022 - Archive for History of Exact Sciences 76 (6):531-571.
    In 1927, Paul Dirac first explicitly introduced the idea that electrodynamical processes can be evaluated by decomposing them into virtual (modern terminology), energy non-conserving subprocesses. This mode of reasoning structured a lot of the perturbative evaluations of quantum electrodynamics during the 1930s. Although the physical picture connected to Feynman diagrams is no longer based on energy non-conserving transitions but on off-shell particles, emission and absorption subprocesses still remain their fundamental constituents. This article will access the introduction and the initial reception (...)
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