Jacobs, Caspar (2024) Symmetries As a Guide to Physical Ideology. [Preprint]
![[img]](https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
Internal_External v2.pdf Download (282kB) |
Abstract
It is a widely-held belief that (the values of) physical quantities are part of a theory's ideology. For example, it seems that special relativity has an ontology of spacetime points and particles, and an ideology of mass and charge properties. But these intuitions cannot be reconciled with the logical structure of physical theories. From the mathematical details of a theory such as special relativity, it turns out that mass and charge properties exist in quite the same way that particles exist: the theory quantifies over them. However, there is a different distinction in physics that can carry the same load, namely that between internal and external quantities. Roughly, the internal quantities depend on the external ones; external quantities instantiate internal ones. In contemporary physics, the values of physical quantities are internal. In this sense, the latter distinction supersedes the former. But ideology has not become irrevelant: we can identify it with the structure of a theory's (external and internal) spaces. Although we can not read off a theory's ideology from the formalism in the same way that we can read off its ontology, we can use symmetries to discover this structure.
| Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
| Social Networking: |
| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creators: |
|
||||||
| Keywords: | symmetries, quantities, ideology, internal, structure | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
||||||
| Depositing User: | Caspar Jacobs | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 12 Nov 2024 13:14 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 12 Nov 2024 13:14 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 24197 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
||||||
| Date: | 2024 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24197 |
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}