Wolf, William J. and Sanchioni, Marco and Read, James (2023) Underdetermination in Classic and Modern Tests of General Relativity. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion precession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’ tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental confirmation of that theory in particular. In this article, we question this orthodoxy, by showing there are classes of both relativistic theories (with spatiotemporal geometrical properties different from those of GR) and non-relativistic theories (in which the lightcones of a relativistic spacetime are ‘flattened’) which would also pass such tests. Thus, (a) issues of underdetermination in the context of GR loom much larger than one might have thought, and (b) given this, one has to think more carefully about what exactly such tests in fact are testing.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||||||||
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| Keywords: | General Relativity, Underdetermination, Experimental Tests of Gravity, Geometrical Trinity, Newton-Cartan Theory, Teleparallel Gravity | ||||||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Astrophysics Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory General Issues > Theory/Observation |
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| Depositing User: | Mr. William Wolf | ||||||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 20 Jul 2023 15:14 | ||||||||||||
| Last Modified: | 20 Jul 2023 15:14 | ||||||||||||
| Item ID: | 22325 | ||||||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Astrophysics Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory General Issues > Theory/Observation |
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| Date: | 19 July 2023 | ||||||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22325 |
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