Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 4: Space, Time and Symmetry III

AGPhil 4.3: Talk

Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 12:00–12:30, H-HS III

Relativity without miracles. — •Adán Sus — University of Valladolid (Spain)

It has recently been claimed that the fact that all the non-gravitational fields are locally Poincaré invariant and that these invariances coincide, in a certain regime, with the symmetries of the spacetime metric is miraculous in general relativity (GR). In this talk I will show that, in the context of GR, it is possible to account for these so-called miracles of relativity. The way to do so involves integrating the realisation that the gravitational field equations (Einstein field equations in GR) impose constraints on the behaviour of matter in a novel interpretation of the equivalence principle, which dictates the determination of local inertial frames through gravitational interaction. This proposed explanation of the miracles can also deal with the cases that are problematic (counter-examples) for the attempts at explaining the coincidence of symmetries in the context of the standard geometrical perspective on relativity theory.