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86Why surplus structure is not superfluousBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 665-695. 2020.The idea that gauge theory has `surplus' structure poses a puzzle: in one much discussed sense, this structure is redundant; but on the other hand, it is also widely held to play an essential role in the theory. In this paper, we employ category-theoretic tools to illuminate an aspect of this puzzle. We precisify what is meant by `surplus' structure by means of functorial comparisons with equivalence classes of gauge fields, and then show that such structure is essential for any theory that repr…Read more
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Northwest Nazarene CollegeGraduate student
Nampa, Idaho, United States of America