Murgueitio Ramírez, Sebastián and Teh, Nicholas (2020) Abandoning Galileo's Ship: The quest for non-relational empirical significance. [Preprint]

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Abstract

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenario, where the subsystem symmetry is related to a change in a charged boundary state. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether such non-relational scenarios are possible for gauge theories. Remarkably, the answer to this question turns out to be closely related to a foundational puzzle that has driven a host of recent developments at the frontiers of theoretical physics. By drawing on these recent developments, we show that a very natural way of elaborating on Greaves and Wallace's claim of non-relational empirical significance for gauge symmetry is incoherent. However, we also argue that much of what they suggest is correct in spirit: one can indeed construct non-relational models of the kind they sketch, albeit ones where the empirical significance is not witnessed by a gauge symmetry but instead by a superficially similar boundary symmetry. Furthermore, the latter casts doubt on whether one really abandons Galileo's ship in such scenarios.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Murgueitio Ramírez, Sebastián smurguei@nd.edu 0000-0003-0035-0150 Teh, Nicholas nteh@nd.edu
Keywords:	Symmetry, empirical significance, Galileo’s ship, Faraday cage, gauge theory, boundary charge, edge modes
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances
Depositing User:	Dr. Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez
Date Deposited:	27 Jun 2020 19:20
Last Modified:	29 Jun 2020 22:04
Item ID:	17335
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances
Date:	June 2020
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/17335

Available Versions of this Item

• Abandoning Galileo's Ship: The quest for non-relational empirical significance. (deposited 27 Jun 2020 19:20) [Currently Displayed]
  • Abandoning Galileo's Ship: The quest for non-relational empirical significance. (deposited 04 Jul 2020 03:07)

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