Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 5: Philosophie der Physik IV

AGPhil 5.3: Vortrag

Freitag, 16. März 2018, 11:00–11:30, H 2033

Limits of Bronstein’s Cube: Compound Reduction and Overlapping Domains in State Space Approaches to Inter-Model Reduction — •Joshua Rosaler — Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology, RWTH Aachen University

The so-called “Bronstein Cube" of physical theories attempts to characterize the relationships among the theories of modern physics by placing them at the corners of a cube, where movement along any dimension of the cube represents a limit as some constant of nature is taken to zero or infinity. The picture of inter-theory relations suggested by the cube suggests that these different limits should commute - for example, the classical limit as Planck’s constant vanishes should commute with the non-relativistic limit in which the speed of light approaches infinity. Elsewhere, I have argued that the relevance of this approach for the behavior of real physical systems is at best obscure, and defended an alternative, model-based approach to reduction in physics that focuses on the relationships between the state spaces of different models (Rosaler 2017), (Rosaler 2015). Here, I will explain how reductions between different models can be composed on this state-space based approach, and also the sense in which different reductions may be said to “commute" on this picture.

References

Rosaler, J. "Reduction as an A Posteriori Relation." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2017.

Rosaler, J. "Local Reduction in Physics." Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2015.