Book Review: 'Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity', by James Read
History and Philosophy of Physics
2024-10-03 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
This is a review of James Read's insightful book, Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity. The book introduces various notions of background-independence which it then makes precise, and uses to make verdicts about background-independence on a wide range of examples of spacetime theories in both classical and quantum gravity. This short book is, in several ways, a worthy example of how technical philosophy of physics ought to be done. I first discuss the content, then raise a number points where I disagree with the book.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.00935,
title = {Book Review: 'Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity', by James Read},
author = {Sebastian De Haro},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.00935},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
9 pages. To appear in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science