Dear friends and colleagues,
next week the summer semester
starts at the University of Bonn, and like in most
places in the world, all teaching and research meetings
will take place online. This is also true for the Bonn
History and Philosophy of Physics Research Seminar,
which will take place via Zoom at least (!) during the
first 4-6 weeks. The first speaker is Tushar Menon; you
can find the title and abstract of his talk below. Since
it’s taking place via zoom anyhow, we wondered if you or
someone from your local groups would like to attend this
and/or some of the other research talks in the
forthcoming weeks. If so, you would be very welcome to
join us! Please also feel free to forward this email to
other historians, philosophers, and physicists, whoever
you think might be interested. I will not send out any
more emails like this for the talks in the next few
weeks (many of which are still to be confirmed), but if
you would like to hear about more zoom-talks like this
then please feel free to subscribe to our local HPP
email list by sending an email with empty subject line
and only “subscribe hpp” in the main body of the email
to
sy...@listen.uni-bonn.de .
I hope you are all well, and that
we can see each other again soon in person!
All the best,
Dennis
Event: Bonn History and
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminar
Speaker: Tushar Menon (Cambridge
and Bonn)
Time: 21 April, 4:15pm CET
21.4.: Tushar Menon (Cambridge): “Settlers of Cartan—how
to be a true relationalist about General Relativity”
Abstract: Oliver Pooley reads the dynamical approach to
special relativity (SR), an approach he developed with
Harvey Brown, as a form of relationalism, since it seeks
to offer an explanation of physical geometry by
ontologically reducing it to facts about the symmetries of
laws governing material bodies. In particular, Brown
describes the Minkowski metric as nothing but the Kleinian
geometry associated with the quantum theory of
non-gravitational physics. Pooley’s own proposal for how
to cash this out is in Humean terms, as a form of
`regularity relationalism’ developed in the context of
Newtonian mechanics by Nick Huggett. For technical reasons
that I will outline in this talk, the prospects for a
generalisation of this proposal to general relativity (GR)
have appeared bleak; indeed, Brown’s own approach to the
metric in GR is non-reductive. In this talk, I argue that
an understanding of GR in terms of Cartan geometry, a
generalisation of Klein geometry, solves the problem, and
allows for an ontological reduction of the metric of GR
along the same lines as the regularity relationalist
account of SR. (This talk is based on joint work with
James Read)
Zoom link:
https://uni-bonn.zoom.us/j/343765054?pwd=T00yNk1xb1E0N2dKZUY3bW9oTDg1dz09
Meeting Password: 665670