Berlin 2014 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 8: Classical Electrodynamics

AGPhil 8.1: Talk

Friday, March 21, 2014, 17:30–18:00, SPA SR22

The Elimination of Fields in Classical Physics — •Mario Hubert — University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Newtonian Mechanics was originally formulated as an action-at-a-distance theory. With the advent of electrodynamics in the 19th century, the ontology of physics was enriched by a further entity apart from matter and forces: the electromagnetic field. The idea of fields was then used to make Newton's gravitational theory spatiotemporally local by the introduction of the gravitational field. However, I want to show that classical fields pose philosophical as well as physical problems that encourage to state that they are not entities in space-time. As a result, I want to point out that classical physics only requires substances and properties in the ontology.