English

Geometrodynamics as Functionalism about Time

History and Philosophy of Physics 2020-11-02 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We review three broadly geometrodynamical---and in part, Machian or relational---projects, from the perspective of spacetime functionalism. We show how all three are examples of functionalist reduction of the type that was advocated by D. Lewis, and nowadays goes by the label 'the Canberra Plan'. The projects are: (1) the recovery of geometrodynamics by Hojman et al. (1976); (2) the programme of Schuller and collaborators (Schuller 2011; Dull, Schuller et al. 2018) to deduce a metric from the physics of matter fields; (3) the deduction of the ADM Hamiltonian by Gomes and Shyam (2016). We end by drawing a positive corollary about shape dynamics: namely, it has a good rationale for the Hamiltonian it postulates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.16199,
  title  = {Geometrodynamics as Functionalism about Time},
  author = {Henrique Gomes and Jeremy Butterfield},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.16199},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

38 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:46:27.744Z