Hamburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 4: Philosophy of Physics 4

AGPhil 4.1: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 1. März 2016, 16:45–17:30, VMP6 HS G

Progress and Gravity: Overcoming Divisions among General Relativity, Particle Physics and the History and Philosophy of Science — •J. Brian Pitts — University of Cambridge, UK

Space-time physics can be illuminated by stronger interaction among GR, particle physics, and the history and philosophy of science. Sometimes old answers make more sense; sometimes new answers or even new questions arise.

Bayesianism shows the value of simplicity, the need for rival theories, and the role of evidence.

Noether's first theorem ties each rigid symmetry of the action to local conservation. GR has an infinity of translations but supposedly 0 local conservation laws. Can one take Noether's theorem more seriously?

A 1950s particle physics spin-2 derivation split the total stress-energy into a term 0 on-shell and a curl to derive Einstein's equations. Hilbert, Klein and Noether started with GR and found such a split; Noether proved the converse. Did Noether invent spin 2 derivations of GR?

Perturbative expansions can be conceptually illuminating. They diagnose Einstein's 1917 `graviton mass'-Lambda confusion. Ogievetsky and Polubarinov invented an infinity of massive spin 2 gravities. Maheshwari showed one to be nonlinearly ghost-free in 1971, but no one noticed. Since 2010-11, 3 ghost-free mass terms are known.

Weyl said that GR spinors couldn't be spinorial in coordinates and used a tetrad. Ogievetsky and Polubarinov invented a nonlinear metric-dependent group realization of spinors in coordinates (near the identity) in 1965. What happens far from the identity?