Eleanor Knox

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the state of the art in the philosophy of physics. It contains 54 self-contained chapters written by leading philosophers of physics at both senior and junior levels, making it the most thorough and detailed volume of its type on the market – nearly every major perspective in the field is represented. The Companion’s 54 chapters are organized into 12 sections. The first seven sections cover all of the major physical theories investigated by philosophers of physics today, and the last five explore key themes that unite the study of these theories. I. Classical Mechanics II. Special Relativity III. General Relativity IV. Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics V. Quantum Field Theory VI. Quantum Gravity VII. Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics VIII. Explanation IX. Intertheoretic Relations X. Symmetries XI. Metaphysics XII. Cosmology

Recent discussions of emergence in physics have focussed on the use of limiting relations, and often particularly on singular or asymptotic limits. We discuss a putative example of emergence that does not fit into this narrative: the case of phonons. These quasi-particles have some claim to be emergent, not least because the way in which they relate to the underlying crystal is almost precisely analogous to the way in which quantum particles relate to the underlying quantum field theory. But there is no need to take a limit when moving from a crystal lattice based description to the phonon description. Not only does this demonstrate that we can have emergence without limits, but also provides a way of understanding cases that do involve limits.

It is well-known that Newton’s theory of gravity, commonly held to describe a gravitational force, can be recast in a geometrical form: Newton- Cartan theory. It is less well-known that general relativity, an apparently geometrical theory, can be reformulated in such a way that it resembles a force theory; teleparallel gravity does just this. This raises questions. One of these concerns theoretical underdetermination. I argue that these theories do not, in fact, represent cases of worrying underdetermination. On close examination, the alternative formulations are best interpreted as postulating the same spacetime ontology. In accepting this, we see that the ontological commitments of these theories cannot be directly deduced from their mathematical form. The geometrical nature of a gravitational theory is not a straightforward consequence of anything internal to that theory as a theory of gravity. Rather, it essentially relies on the rest of nature (the nongravitational interactions) conspiring to choose the appropriate set of inertial frames.