Related papers: Two Dogmas of Dynamicism
General relativity promotes space-time to a physical, dynamical object subject to equations of motion. Quantum gravity, accordingly, must provide a quantum framework for space-time, applicable on the smallest distance scales. Just like…
This work places the invariant $ds^2$ at the center of the gravitational interaction, interpreting it not as a purely geometric object but as the differential of proper time, endowed with direct physical meaning. Starting from the extension…
The conventional spacetime formulation of general relativity may be recast as a dynamics of spatial 3-geometries (geometrodynamics). Furthermore, geometrodynamics can be derived from first principles. I investigate two distinct sets of…
The historical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity are revisited, putting the main focus on the physical meaning of the invariant ds, the Equivalence Principle, and the precise interpretation of spacetime geometry. It is argued…
If gravity respects quantum mechanics, it is important to identify the essential postulates of a quantum framework capable of incorporating gravitational phenomena. Such a construct likely requires elimination or modification of some of the…
There exist several ways of constructing general relativity from `first principles': Einstein's original derivation, Lovelock's results concerning the exceptional nature of the Einstein tensor from a mathematical perspective, and…
What if physics is just the way we perceive geometry? That is, what if geometry and physics will one day become one and the same discipline? I believe that will mean we will at last really understand physics, without postulates other than…
A general relativistic description of a disk rotating at constant angular velocity is given. It is argued that conceptually this direct approach poses fewer problems than the special relativistic one. For observers on the disk, the geometry…
Gravitation, according to General Relativity, is an attribute of space-time's geometry and hence not a force in the Newtonian sense. This is a consequence of Einstein's equivalence principle, which so far passed all experimental tests with…
Well-known to specialists but little-known to the wider audience is that Newtonian gravity can be understood as geodesic motion in space-time, where time is absolute and space is Euclidean. Newtonian cosmology formulated by Heckmann agrees…
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…
The two surprising features of gravity are (a) the principle of equivalence and (b) the connection between gravity and thermodynamics. Using principle of equivalence and special relativity in the {\it local inertial frame}, one could obtain…
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.…
Shape dynamics is a completely background-independent universal framework of dynamical theories from which all absolute elements have been eliminated. For particles, only the variables that describe the shapes of the instantaneous particle…
The configuration space of general relativity is superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics modulo diffeomorphisms. However, it has been argued that the configuration space for gravity should be conformal superspace - the space of…
We study the cosmological dynamics of a class of symmetric teleparallel gravity theories known as ``newer general relativity'' using the methods of dynamical systems, restricted to the case of vacuum solutions with a spatially flat…
The following offers a new axiomatic basis of mechanics and physics in their most important dynamics domain, i. e. an axiom (principle) of completeness intended to generalize Newton's second law of motion for the case of a non-stationary…
The nature of a physical law is examined, and it is suggested that there may not be any fundamental dynamical laws. This explains the intrinsic indeterminism of quantum theory. The probabilities for transition from a given initial state to…
We describe a completely general and fully non-perturbative framework for constructing dynamical reference frames in generally covariant theories, and for understanding the gauge-invariant observables that they yield. Our approach makes use…
In general relativity (GR), spacetime geometry is no longer just a background arena but a physical and dynamical entity with its own degrees of freedom. We present an overview of approaches to quantum gravity in which this central feature…