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120Symmetries and RepresentationPhilosophy Compass. 2024.It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train w…Read more
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188On Symmetries and SpringsPhilosophy of Science. forthcoming.Imagine that we are on a train playing with some mechanical systems. Why can’t we detect any differences in their behavior when the train is parked versus when it is moving uniformly? The standard answer is that boosts are symmetries of Newtonian systems. In this paper, I use the case of a spring to argue that this answer is problematic because symmetries are neither sufficient nor necessary for preserving its behavior. I also develop a new answer according to which boosts preserve the relationa…Read more
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324Causation and the conservation of energy in general relativityThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If thi…Read more
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45The Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration: History, Philosophy, and CultureGalaxies 11 (1): 32. 2023.This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
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30Separating Einstein's separabilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 72 138-149. 2020.In this paper, I accomplish a conceptual task and a historical task. The conceptual task is to argue that (1) Einstein’s Principle of Separability (henceforth “separability”) is not a supervenience principle and that (2) separability and entanglement are compatible. I support (1) by showing that the conclusion of Einstein’s incompleteness argument would still follow even if one assumes that the state of a composite system does not supervene on the states of the subsystems, and by showing that w…Read more
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71Measuring Absolute VelocityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4): 806-816. 2021.ABSTRACT We argue that Roberts’s argument for the thesis that absolute velocity is not measurable in a Newtonian world is unsound, because it depends on an analysis of measurement that is not extensionally adequate. We propose an alternative analysis of measurement, one that is extensionally adequate and entails that absolute velocity is measured in at least one Newtonian world. If our analysis is correct, then this Newtonian world is a counterexample to the widely endorsed thesis that if a prop…Read more
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34A Puzzle Concerning Local Symmetries and Their Empirical SignificanceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (4): 1021-1044. 2022.In the last 5 years, the controversy about whether or not gauge transformations can be empirically significant has intensified. On the one hand, Greaves and Wallace developed a framework according to which, under some circumstances, gauge transformations can be empirically significant—and Teh further supported this result by using the constrained Hamiltonian formalism. On the other hand, Friederich claims to have proved that gauge transformation can never be empirically significant. In this arti…Read more
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49Abandoning Galileo's Ship: The quest for non-relational empirical significanceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenar…Read more
West Lafayette, IN, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Physics, Misc |
General Philosophy of Science |
Metaphysics |