[PhilPhys] Fwd: Bonn History of Philosophy of Physics Seminar on Zoom

[Erik Curiel]

Some of y'all may find this of interest.

E


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Bonn History of Philosophy of Physics Seminar on Zoom
Date: 	Sun, 19 Apr 2020 07:46:29 -0400
From: 	Dennis Lehmkuhl <dennis.lehmkuhl at uni-bonn.de>
To: 	Dennis Lehmkuhl <dennis.lehmkuhl at uni-bonn.de>



Dear friends and colleagues,

next week the summer semester starts at the University of Bonn, and like 
in most places in the world, all teaching and research meetings will 
take place online. This is also true for the Bonn History and Philosophy 
of Physics Research Seminar, which will take place via Zoom at least (!) 
during the first 4-6 weeks. The first speaker is Tushar Menon; you can 
find the title and abstract of his talk below. Since it’s taking place 
via zoom anyhow, we wondered if you or someone from your local groups 
would like to attend this and/or some of the other research talks in the 
forthcoming weeks. If so, you would be very welcome to join us! Please 
also feel free to forward this email to other historians, philosophers, 
and physicists, whoever you think might be interested. I will not send 
out any more emails like this for the talks in the next few weeks (many 
of which are still to be confirmed), but if you would like to hear about 
more zoom-talks like this then please feel free to subscribe to our 
local HPP email list by sending an email with empty subject line and 
only “subscribe hpp” in the main body of the email to 
sympa at listen.uni-bonn.de <mailto:sympa at listen.uni-bonn.de> .

I hope you are all well, and that we can see each other again soon in 
person!

All the best,
Dennis


Event: Bonn History and Philosophy of Physics Research Seminar
Speaker: Tushar Menon (Cambridge and Bonn)
Time: 21 April, 4:15pm CET

21.4.: Tushar Menon (Cambridge): “Settlers of Cartan—how to be a true 
relationalist about General Relativity”

Abstract: Oliver Pooley reads the dynamical approach to special 
relativity (SR), an approach he developed with Harvey Brown, as a form 
of relationalism, since it seeks to offer an explanation of physical 
geometry by ontologically reducing it to facts about the symmetries of 
laws governing material bodies. In particular, Brown describes the 
Minkowski metric as nothing but the Kleinian geometry associated with 
the quantum theory of non-gravitational physics. Pooley’s own proposal 
for how to cash this out is in Humean terms, as a form of `regularity 
relationalism’ developed in the context of Newtonian mechanics by Nick 
Huggett. For technical reasons that I will outline in this talk,  the 
prospects for a generalisation of this proposal to general relativity 
(GR) have appeared bleak; indeed, Brown’s own approach to the metric in 
GR is non-reductive. In this talk, I argue that an understanding of GR 
in terms of Cartan geometry, a generalisation of Klein geometry, solves 
the problem, and allows for an ontological reduction of the metric of GR 
along the same lines as the regularity relationalist account of 
SR. (This talk is based on joint work with James Read)

Zoom link: 
https://uni-bonn.zoom.us/j/343765054?pwd=T00yNk1xb1E0N2dKZUY3bW9oTDg1dz09

Meeting Password: 665670


--------------------
Dennis Lehmkuhl
Lichtenberg Professor for History and Philosophy of Physics,
Institute of Philosophy,
University of Bonn
history-and-philosophy-of-physics.com 
<http://history-and-philosophy-of-physics.com>