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  1. Why Constructive Relativity Fails.John D. Norton - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):821-834.
    Constructivists, such as Harvey Brown, urge that the geometries of Newtonian and special relativistic spacetimes result from the properties of matter. Whatever this may mean, it commits constructivists to the claim that these spacetime geometries can be inferred from the properties of matter without recourse to spatiotemporal presumptions or with few of them. I argue that the construction project only succeeds if constructivists antecedently presume the essential commitments of a realist conception of spacetime. These commitments can be avoided only by (...)
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  • Drawing the line between kinematics and dynamics in special relativity.Michel Janssen - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40 (1):26-52.
    In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...)
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  • Appearance and reality: Einstein and the early debate on the reality of length contraction.Marco Giovanelli - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (4):1-30.
    In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where length contraction is only an (...)
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  • Bell's Spaceships Problem and the Foundations of Special Relativity.Francisco Fernflores - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (4):351-370.
    Recent ?dynamical? approaches to relativity by Harvey Brown and his colleagues have used John Bell's own solution to a problem in relativity which has in the past sometimes been called ?Bell's spaceships paradox?, in a central way. This paper examines solutions to this problem in greater detail and from a broader philosophical perspective than Brown et al. offer. It also analyses the well-known analogy between special relativity and classical thermodynamics. This analysis leads to the sceptical conclusion that Bell's solution yields (...)
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