International Workshop
Spacetime: Fundamental or Emergent?
Universitätsclub Bonn, Konviktstr. 9, 53113 Bonn, Germany
Oct 26 - Oct 28, 2017
https://www.philosophie.uni-bonn.de/de/aktuelles/tagung-spacetime
This workshop is organised by Andreas Bartels and Kian Salimkhani, as an event of the DFG-Research-Group "Inductive Metaphysics" (FOR 2495).
Spacetime: Fundamental or Emergent?
Universitätsclub Bonn, Konviktstr. 9, 53113 Bonn, Germany
Oct 26 - Oct 28, 2017
https://www.philosophie.uni-bonn.de/de/aktuelles/tagung-spacetime
This workshop is organised by Andreas Bartels and Kian Salimkhani, as an event of the DFG-Research-Group "Inductive Metaphysics" (FOR 2495).
Description
Spacetime or spatiotemporal relations have traditionally been considered as perfect candidates for fundamental enti- ties or structures of reality. However, in modern physics and philosophy this general agreement has been challenged by, for example, physical theories that try to recover spacetime as an emergent structure resulting in the current debate on the (non-)fundamentality of spacetime.
With respect to this debate, our workshop attempts to explore three central aspects: First, what kind of entity is spacetime? Is it essentially a geometrical entity, as the received view has it, or just a physical field that can be described by geometrical means? Is that field grounding other physical fields, or is it rather one among many?
Second, this naturally evokes the question of what is involved in claims of fundamentality of physical entities, and thus is connected to a current debate in the metaphysics of science. We suggest that the issue of fundamentality or emergence is where the general metaphysical status of scientific entities is reflected within physics.
Third, the foregoing topics merge in the concrete question of what different approaches to quantum gravity, like loop quantum gravity, the spin-2 approach, or string theory, may reveal about the status of spacetime. Is spacetime an emer-gent entity as most approaches seem to suggest? If so, which concept of emergence will apply? We suggest that these questions indicate how closely metaphysical issues are entangled with the current development of physics.
Spacetime or spatiotemporal relations have traditionally been considered as perfect candidates for fundamental enti- ties or structures of reality. However, in modern physics and philosophy this general agreement has been challenged by, for example, physical theories that try to recover spacetime as an emergent structure resulting in the current debate on the (non-)fundamentality of spacetime.
With respect to this debate, our workshop attempts to explore three central aspects: First, what kind of entity is spacetime? Is it essentially a geometrical entity, as the received view has it, or just a physical field that can be described by geometrical means? Is that field grounding other physical fields, or is it rather one among many?
Second, this naturally evokes the question of what is involved in claims of fundamentality of physical entities, and thus is connected to a current debate in the metaphysics of science. We suggest that the issue of fundamentality or emergence is where the general metaphysical status of scientific entities is reflected within physics.
Third, the foregoing topics merge in the concrete question of what different approaches to quantum gravity, like loop quantum gravity, the spin-2 approach, or string theory, may reveal about the status of spacetime. Is spacetime an emer-gent entity as most approaches seem to suggest? If so, which concept of emergence will apply? We suggest that these questions indicate how closely metaphysical issues are entangled with the current development of physics.
Speakers
- Karen Crowther (Geneva, Switzerland)
- Richard Dawid (Stockholm, Sweden)
- Neil Dewar (Munich, Germany)
- Michael Esfeld (Lausanne, Switzerland)
- Dennis Lehmkuhl (Caltech, California)
- J. Brian Pitts (Cambridge, England)
- James Read (Oxford, England)
- Kian Salimkhani (Bonn, Germany)
- Alastair Wilson (Birmingham, England)
- Christian Wüthrich (Geneva, Switzerland)
Program
Thursday, Oct 26
|
10:30 - 10:45
10:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 14:00 14:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 16:45 |
Official Welcome
Dennis Lehmkuhl: "Is it possible for spacetime to be neither fundamental nor emergent? Learning from Einstein’s path towards field realism" lunch Neil Dewar: "Noether’s theorems from the perspective of general covariance" coffee break James Read: "Two miracles of general relativity" |
Friday, Oct 27
|
9:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 14:00 14:00 - 15:15 15:15 - 15:30 15:30 - 16:45 16:45 - 17:00 17:00 - 18:15 19:30 |
Christian Wüthrich: "Spacetime is as spacetime does"
coffee break Karen Crowther: "Fundamentality and emergence in quantum gravity" lunch Michael Esfeld: "An argument for fundamental distance relations" coffee break Alastair Wilson: "Dependence without spacetime" coffee break Kian Salimkhani: "Lorentz invariance and the non-fundamentality of spacetime" Conference Dinner |
Saturday, Oct 28
|
9:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 12:00 12:00 - 13:00 13:00 - 15:00 |
J. Brian Pitts: "What represents space-time and what follows for substantivalism vs. relationalism and for gravitational energy?"
coffee break Richard Dawid: "String theory, empirical equivalence and fundamentality" lunch social program |