Seminar: Philosophy of Physics
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The Principle of Relativity in historical and philosophical perspective. For the history from Galileo to Einstein, we will read Olivier Darrigol’s recent (2022) book on the topic supplemented by various primary sources. For the philosophy, the problem is simply to formulate the principle in a non-question begging way, especially in light of Kretschmann’s 1917 observation that general covariance alone does not constitute a general principle of relativity, as well as his contention that, properly analyzed, general relativity is less relativistic than special relativity. We will then consider various formulations by physicists and philosophers over the last 50 years.
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