On miracles and spacetime

Journal article

What have recently been dubbed two ‘miracles’ of general relativity—(1) that all non-gravitational interactions are locally governed by Poincaré invariant dynamical laws; and (2) that, in the regime of experimental practice in which curvature effects may be ignored, the local Poincaré symmetries of the dynamical laws governing matter fields coincide with the local Poincaré symmetries of the dynamical metric field—remain unaccounted for in that theory. In this paper, I demonstrate that these two ‘miracles’ admit of a natural explanation in one particular successor theory to general relativity—namely, perturbative string theory. I argue that this point has important implications when considering both the ‘chronogeometricity’ (that is, the object in question being surveyed by rods and clocks built from matter fields) and spatiotemporal status of the dynamical metric field in both general relativity and perturbative string theory.

Authors: Read, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics More from this journal
• Volume: 65
• Pages: 103-111
• Publication date: 2018-11-06
• Acceptance date: 2018-10-11
• DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsb.2018.10.002
• ISSN: 1355-2198
• Language: English
• Keywords: relativity; spacetime functionalism; dualities; string theory; chronogeometry