Equivalence and Duality in Electromagnetism
Abstract
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 fits naturally into at least one framework for assessing equivalence---that of categorical equivalence---but that it fails to meet a necessary condition for equivalence on that account. The reason is that the duality does not preserve "empirical content" in the required sense; instead, it takes models to models with "dual" empirical content. I conclude by discussing how one might react to this.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1906.09699,
title = {Equivalence and Duality in Electromagnetism},
author = {James Owen Weatherall},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09699},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
15 pages; given as part of a symposium at the 2018 PSA meeting. This version corrects an error in the previous version wherein a quote was misattributed to Polchinski (2017)