Why the Weyl Tile Argument is Wrong

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Weyl famously argued that if space were discrete, then Euclidean geometry could not hold even approximately. Since then, many philosophers have responded to this argument by advancing alternative accounts of discrete geometry that recover approximately Euclidean space. However, they have missed an importantly flawed assumption in Weyl’s argument: physical geometry is determined by fundamental spacetime structures independently from dynamical laws. In this paper, I aim to show its falsity through two rigorous examples: random walks in statistical physics and quantum mechanics.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,928

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Zeno's Paradoxes and the Tile Argument.Jean Paul Bendegevanm - 1987 - Philosophy of Science 54 (2):295-.
Zeno's paradoxes and the tile argument.Jean Paul van Bendegem - 1987 - Philosophy of Science 54 (2):295-302.
Weyl’s gauge argument.Alexander Afriat - 2013 - Foundations of Physics 43 (5):699-705.
Distance and Discrete Space.K. Mcdaniel - 2007 - Synthese 155 (1):157-162.
On Birkhoff's and Einstein's relativity theory.Carlton W. Berenda - 1945 - Philosophy of Science 12 (2):116-119.
Continua.Lu Chen - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Canonical Quantization of a Massive Weyl Field.Maxim Dvornikov - 2012 - Foundations of Physics 42 (11):1469-1479.
Hermann Weyl's Mathematics, Science and Phenomenology.Richard A. Feist - 1999 - Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario (Canada)

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-08-24

Downloads
66 (#246,166)

6 months
23 (#119,468)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Lu Chen
Koc University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

What price spacetime substantivalism? The hole story.John Earman & John Norton - 1987 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (4):515-525.
Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science.Hermann Weyl & Olaf Helmer - 1951 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2 (7):257-260.
Region-based topology.Peter Roeper - 1997 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 26 (3):251-309.
Why Constructive Relativity Fails.John D. Norton - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):821-834.
World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time.John S. Earman - 1992 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (4):573-580.

View all 13 references / Add more references