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Sameness and Separability in Gauge Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John Dougherty
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Abstract

In the philosophical literature on Yang-Mills theories, field formulations are taken to have more structure and to be local, while curve-based formulations are taken to have less structure and to be nonlocal. I formalize the notion of locality at issue and show that theories with less structure are nonlocal. However, the amount of structure had by some formulation is independent of whether it uses fields or curves. The relevant difference in structure is not a difference in set-theoretic structure. Rather, it is a difference in the structure of the category of models of the theory.

Type
Physical Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 5 , December 2017 , pp. 1189 - 1201
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

For helpful comments, discussion, and guidance, thanks are owed to Ben Feintzeig, Sarita Rosenstock, Sebastian Speitel, Anncy Thresher, Jim Weatherall, and the University of California, Irvine, philosophy of physics reading group. This work was performed under a collaborative agreement between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Geneva and made possible by grant (10) 56314 from the John Templeton Foundation, and its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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