Related papers: Relational Paradigm in Asks and Answers
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work very well in the Earth's immediate neighborhood, but arguments abound that it needs modification at very small and/or…
Absolute space is eliminated from the body of mechanics by gauging translations and rotations in the Lagrangian of a classical system. The procedure implies the addition of compensating terms to the kinetic energy, in such a way that the…
The problem of absolute motion in the context of the twin paradox is discussed. It is shown that the various versions of the clock paradox feature some aspects which Mach might have been appreciated. However, the ultimate cause of the…
Relationalism -- along the lines developed by Barbour and collaborators in the past 3 decades -- can be considered an advance with 1/4 of the facets of the canonical approach's Problem of Time as identified by Isham and Kuchar. Indeed,…
Logical relations (LR) have been around for many years, and today they are used in many formal results. However, it can be difficult to LR beginners to find a good place to start to learn. Papers often use highly specialized LRs that use…
An ontology of Leibnizian relationalism, consisting in distance relations among sparse matter points and their change only, is well recognized as a serious option in the context of classical mechanics. In this paper, we investigate how this…
The widely known but also somewhat esoteric Mach principle envisages a fully relational formulation of physical theories without any reference to a concept of `absolute space'. When applied to classical mechanics, under the guise of an…
The motivation for relativistic world is built on robust common sense and on general physical principles which are accessible to even a school student. Author likes to call it a farmer's perspective.
Mach argued for a relational rather than an absolute notion of space, insisting that centrifugal forces inside a rotating object such as a bucket can be reproduced by keeping the bucket fixed and rotating the universe. In response to a…
In this paper I argue that the fundamental aspect of our notion of time is that it defines an order relation, be it a total order relation between configurations of the world or just a partial order relation between events. This position is…
General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on…
Most of the logical objections against the classical laws of motion, as they are usually presented in textbooks, centre on the fact that defining force in terms of mass and acceleration, the first two laws are mere assertions of concepts to…
Relativistic action-at-a-distance theories with interactions that propagate at the speed of light in vacuum are investigated. We consider the most general action depending on the velocities and relative positions of the particles. The…
We consider the problem of predicting plausible missing facts in relational data, given a set of imperfect logical rules. In particular, our aim is to provide bounds on the (expected) number of incorrect inferences that are made in this…
We introduce relationalism and discuss how it is useful for interpreting probability theory and quantum mechanics. This paper is written in relatively lay terms and presumes no prior knowledge of quantum theory.
Following recent assumptions to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the structure of spacetime is suppose to be a consequence of the relations among some fundamental objects, and its concept can be formulated without the…
We discuss the nature and a general formulation of the relativity principle and we show that it can be justified starting from a strictly operational point of view. We give some remark on the connection with the spacetime symmetry groups.…
We offer a fresh perspective on the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics as a way of thinking about the world described by quantum theory based on quantifiable notions of information. This allows us to provide a definition of a…
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…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…