Related papers: Relationalism
Brukner and Pienaar have critiqued the Relational Quantum Mechanics of Rovelli, and together with Di Biagio, the latter has replied. I point out a few places where, in my view, that reply needs clarification.
The treatment of time in relativity does not conform to that in quantum theory. In the context of quantum gravity this is called "the problem of time". A crucial difference is that time $t$ may be seen as an observable in relativity theory,…
The notion of shape space was introduced in the second half of the 20th Century as a useful analytical tool for tackling problems related to the intrinsic spatial configuration of material systems. In recent years, the geometrical…
On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom.…
This paper provides an examination of the de Broglie relation, tracing its historical development from the quantum hypotheses proposed by Planck and Einstein to its covariant relativistic derivation. The discussion begins by situating de…
This article motivates and presents the scale relativistic approach to non-differentiability in mechanics and its relation to quantum mechanics. It stems from the scale relativity proposal to extend the principle of relativity to…
Shape dynamics is an alternative background-independent approach to classical dynamics that implements Leibnizian philosophy and Mach's Principles. It is a formulation of the dynamics of the universe in terms of the intrinsic and relational…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
We introduce the concepts of dependence and independence in a very general framework. We use a concept of rank to study dependence and independence. By means of the rank we identify (total) dependence with inability to create more…
Tarski gave a general semantics for deductive reasoning: a formula a may be deduced from a set A of formulas iff a holds in all models in which each of the elements of A holds. A more liberal semantics has been considered: a formula a may…
This Series of Articles provides a local resolution of this major longstanding foundational problem between QM and GR, or, more generally, between Background Dependent and Background Independent Physics. We focus on the classical version;…
The quantization of time-reparametrization invariant systems such as general relativity is plagued by an ambiguity relating to the role of time in the theory. If one parametrizes observables by the (unobservable) time, and then relies on…
Relational mechanics is a gauge theory of classical mechanics whose laws do not govern the motion of individual particles but the evolution of the distances between particles. Its formulation gives a satisfactory answer to Leibniz's and…
In relativistic space-time, Bohmian theories can be formulated by introducing a privileged foliation of space-time. The introduction of such a foliation - as extra absolute space-time structure - would seem to imply a clear violation of…
We claim that both multipartiteness and localization of subsystems of compound quantum systems are of an essentially relative nature crucially depending on the set of operationalistically available states. In a more general setting, to…
We propose that observables in quantum theory are properly understood as representatives of symmetry-invariant quantities relating one system to another, the latter to be called a reference system. We provide a rigorous mathematical…
Relational particle models are useful toy models for quantum cosmology and the problem of time in quantum general relativity. This paper shows how to extend existing work on concrete examples of relational particle models in 1-d to include…
The analyzability of the universe into subsystems requires a concept of the "independence" of the subsystems, of which the relativistic quantum world supports many distinct notions which either coincide or are trivial in the classical…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…
We put forward a new view of relativity theory that makes the existence of a flow of time compatible with the four-dimensional block universe. To this end, we apply the creation-discovery view elaborated for quantum mechanics to relativity…