Foundations of Spacetime

Catalog description

This course is a mathematically rigorous introduction to some of the central conceptual questions about the nature of spacetime arising within the foundations of physics. Should spacetime be understood as a ‘thing’ or ‘entity’ that exists in the same sense as matter, or is it rather better understood as somehow derivative or constructed---as cognitive scaffolding that is useful in formulating theories but which doesn’t exist in the same sense as the physical entities posited by those theories? Does this distinction exhaust the available options? We will look at a variety of attitudes one might take towards the nature of spacetime, and consider both how our best physical theories bear on those attitudes and how those attitudes in turn bear on our best physical theories. To familiarize ourselves with the central positions, arguments, and lines of reasoning, we will start in the classical regime before extending the discussion to relativity theory. Along the way we will consider how the issues evolve, what new interpretive questions arise, and the implications that this set of conceptual debates has for the development of future physics.