Journal article
Underdetermination in classic and modern tests of general relativity
- Abstract:
- Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion precession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’ tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental confirmation of that theory in particular. In this article, we question this orthodoxy, by showing there are classes of both relativistic theories (with spatiotemporal geometrical properties different from those of GR) and nonrelativistic theories (in which the lightcones of a relativistic spacetime are ‘widened’) which would also pass such tests. Thus, (a) issues of underdetermination in the context of GR loom much larger than one might have thought, and (b) given this, one has to think more carefully about what exactly such tests in fact are testing.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 655.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s13194-024-00617-1
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- European Journal for Philosophy of Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 4
- Article number:
- 57
- Publication date:
- 2024-10-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-09-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1879-4920
- ISSN:
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1879-4912
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
-
2031288
- Local pid:
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pubs:2031288
- Deposit date:
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2024-09-20
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Wolf et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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