Related papers: Theoretical Equivalence in Physics
The main aim of this paper is to make a remark about the relation between (i) dualities between theories, as `duality' is understood in physics and (ii) equivalence of theories, as `equivalence' is understood in logic and philosophy. The…
I argue that, on a judicious reading of two existing criteria--one syntactic and the other semantic--dual theories can be taken to be empirically equivalent. The judicious reading is straightforward, but leads to the surprising conclusion…
Theoretical equivalence and duality are two closely related notions: but their interconnection has so far not been well understood. In this paper I explicate the contribution of a recent schema for duality to discussions of theoretical…
In this paper I bring the recent philosophical literature on theoretical equivalence to bear on dualities in physics. Focusing on electromagnetic duality, which is a simple example of S-duality in string theory, I will show that the duality…
In recent years philosophers of science have explored categorical equivalence as a promising criterion for when two (physical) theories are equivalent. On the one hand, philosophers have presented several examples of theories whose…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
A generalized view of Duality is offered as a bridge between physical sciences and the more abstract philosophical dimensions bordering on mysticism. To that end several examples of duality are first cited from from conventional physics…
In this essay I begin to lay out a conceptual scheme for: (i) analysing dualities as cases of theoretical equivalence; (ii) assessing when cases of theoretical equivalence are also cases of physical equivalence. The scheme is applied to…
A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of…
Logicians and philosophers of science have proposed various formal criteria for theoretical equivalence. In this paper, we examine two such proposals: definitional equivalence and categorical equivalence. In order to show precisely how…
For more than half a century, dualities have been at the heart of modern physics. From quantum mechanics to statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity, dualities have proven useful in solving…
Modern formulations of equivalence principles provide the foundation for an efficient approach to understanding and organizing the structural features of gravitation field theories. Since theories' predictions reflect differences in their…
Analogies have had and continue to have an important role in the development of theoretical physics. They may start from similarities of physical concepts followed by similarities in the mathematical formalization or it may be a purely…
We introduce a new way of quantifying the degrees of incompatibility of two ob- servables in a probabilistic physical theory and, based on this, a global measure of the degree of incompatibility inherent in such theories, across all…
In this paper, we argue that there are foundational dilemmas in theoretical physics related to the concept of reality and the nature of mathematics in physics. Physical theory is treated as a conceptual organism which develops under the…
Two quantum theories are physically equivalent if they are related, not by a unitary transformation, but by an isometric transformation. The conditions under which a quantum canonical transformation is an isometric transformation are given.
In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out if two theories are "equivalent" (essentially the same) or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide means to measure distances (and explore…
With an eye on developing a quantum theory of gravity, many physicists have recently searched for quantum challenges to the equivalence principle of general relativity. However, as historians and philosophers of science are well aware, the…
This paper aims to provide an analysis of what it means when we say that a pair of theories, very generously construed, are equivalent in the sense that they are interdefinable. With regard to theories articulated in first order logic, we…
In Quantum Physics there are circumstances where the direct measurement of particular observables encounters diffculties; in some of these cases, however, its value can be evaluated, i.e. it can be inferred by measuring another observable…