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  1. Who's afraid of coordinate systems? An essay on representation of spacetime structure.David Wallace - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 67:125-136.
    Coordinate-based approaches to physical theories remain standard in mainstream physics but are largely eschewed in foundational discussion in favour of coordinate-free differential-geometric approaches. I defend the conceptual and mathematical legitimacy of the coordinate-based approach for foundational work. In doing so, I provide an account of the Kleinian conception of geometry as a theory of invariance under symmetry groups; I argue that this conception continues to play a very substantial role in contemporary mathematical physics and indeed that supposedly ``coordinate-free'' differential geometry (...)
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  • Space–time philosophy reconstructed via massive Nordström scalar gravities? Laws vs. geometry, conventionality, and underdetermination.J. Brian Pitts - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 53:73-92.
    What if gravity satisfied the Klein-Gordon equation? Both particle physics from the 1920s-30s and the 1890s Neumann-Seeliger modification of Newtonian gravity with exponential decay suggest considering a "graviton mass term" for gravity, which is _algebraic_ in the potential. Unlike Nordström's "massless" theory, massive scalar gravity is strictly special relativistic in the sense of being invariant under the Poincaré group but not the 15-parameter Bateman-Cunningham conformal group. It therefore exhibits the whole of Minkowski space-time structure, albeit only indirectly concerning volumes. Massive (...)
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  • The Forgotten Tradition: How the Logical Empiricists Missed the Philosophical Significance of the Work of Riemann, Christoffel and Ricci.Marco Giovanelli - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (6):1219-1257.
    This paper attempts to show how the logical empiricists’ interpretation of the relation between geometry and reality emerges from a “collision” of mathematical traditions. Considering Riemann’s work as the initiator of a 19th century geometrical tradition, whose main protagonists were Helmholtz and Poincaré, the logical empiricists neglected the fact that Riemann’s revolutionary insight flourished instead in a non-geometrical tradition dominated by the works of Christoffel and Ricci-Curbastro roughly in the same years. I will argue that, in the attempt to interpret (...)
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  • Nothing but coincidences: the point-coincidence and Einstein’s struggle with the meaning of coordinates in physics.Marco Giovanelli - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-64.
    In his 1916 review paper on general relativity, Einstein made the often-quoted oracular remark that all physical measurements amount to a determination of coincidences, like the coincidence of a pointer with a mark on a scale. This argument, which was meant to express the requirement of general covariance, immediately gained great resonance. Philosophers such as Schlick found that it expressed the novelty of general relativity, but the mathematician Kretschmann deemed it as trivial and valid in all spacetime theories. With the (...)
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  • Empirical equivalence, artificial gauge freedom and a generalized kretschmann objection.J. Brian Pitts - unknown
    Einstein considered general covariance to characterize the novelty of his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), but Kretschmann thought it merely a formal feature that any theory could have. The claim that GTR is ``already parametrized'' suggests analyzing substantive general covariance as formal general covariance achieved without hiding preferred coordinates as scalar ``clock fields,'' much as Einstein construed general covariance as the lack of preferred coordinates. Physicists often install gauge symmetries artificially with additional fields, as in the transition from Proca's to (...)
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