Gajic, Gregor and Lilani, Nikesh and Read, James
(2024)
Another philosophical look at twistor theory.
[Preprint]
Abstract
Despite its being one of Roger Penrose's greatest contributions to spacetime physics, there is a dearth of philosophical literature on twistor theory. The one exception to this is (Bain, 2006)---but although excellent, there remains much more to be said going beyond that article on the foundations and philosophy of twistor theory. In this article, we seek to make some progress in this direction, by (a) presenting an introduction to twistor theory which should be (reasonably) accessible to philosophers, (b) considering how the spacetime--twistor correspondence interacts with the blossoming philosophical literature on theoretical equivalence, and (c) exploring the bearing which twistor theory might have on philosophical issues such as the status of dynamics, the geometrisation of physics, spacetime ontology, the emergence of spacetime, and symmetry-to-reality inferences. We close with an elaboration of a variety of further opportunities for philosophical investigation into twistor theory.
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