Скачать или смотреть Tushar Menon: On the function of spacetime

'Spacetime Functionalism', Geneva Symmetry Group Workshop

Geneva, 1-2 March 2018


Tushar Menon (University of Oxford): On the function of spacetime

Abstract: Spacetime functionalism is an important research programme in the field of quantum gravity, given the resources it has to tell a story about the appearance of spacetime even in theories which do not obviously include fundamental spatiotemporal degrees of freedom. But what exactly is the role of spacetime that the functionalist relies on? I contend that there are two distinct conceptions of spacetime at work in physics, based on two separate roles. `Theoretical spacetime’ is the structured set of independent variables of a matter field theory whose structure reflects the dynamical symmetries of the matter field theory. `Operational spacetime’, on the other hand, involves more than just symmetry structure, and codifies the behaviour of certain types of stable matter configurations. In appealing only to inertial structure, Eleanor Knox’s brand of functionalism can only be guaranteed to reproduce theoretical spacetime, although in many cases, further contingent facts about matter dynamics ensure that it also reproduces operational spacetimes. In this talk, I argue that the extra structure required to guarantee the recovery of operational spacetime in matter field theories can be obtained on a slightly liberalised conception of Brown and Pooley’s `dynamical approach’.