Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 2, MT23)
Thursday 19 October, 3pm
Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Nicholas Teh (Notre Dame): 'Understanding the Geroch–Jang argument'
In some corners of the philosophy of physics, Geroch and Jang's "theorem" of 1975 has been held up as a model for how geodesic motion is to be explained in General Relativity. This raises the question of the extent to which the conceptual and mathematical structure of the Geroch-Jang (GJ) argument has been interrogated by the community. In this talk, based on joint work with Dominic Dold (University of Notre Dame and MPIWG), I will argue that the original GJ argument has been insufficiently understood and contains important lacunae. Furthermore, filling in these lacunae will illuminate several important themes, viz. (i) the sense in which part of GJ's result is Special Relativistic; (ii) the sense in which this Special Relativistic result is "extended" to General Relativity; and (iii) the relationship between such an extension and the "equivalence principle" as understood by Linnemann, Read and Teh in https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01534. The resulting picture will also shed light on the extent to which the GJ argument uses the dynamical content of General Relativity, as well as the reasons for which this style of argumentation has played a relatively minor role in contemporary work on the geodesic principle within mathematical physics.
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