On the Meaning of Local Symmetries: Epistemic-Ontological Dialectics

Jordan François; Lucrezia Ravera

doi:10.1007/s10701-025-00849-y

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arXiv · 2404.17449

On the Meaning of Local Symmetries: Epistemic-Ontological Dialectics

Jordan François·Lucrezia Ravera

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Abstract

We propose our account of the meaning of local symmetries. We argue that the general covariance principle and gauge principle both are principles of democratic epistemic access to the law of physics, leading to ontological insights about the objective nature of spacetime. We further argue that relationality is a core notion of general-relativistic gauge field theory, tacitly encoded by its (active) local symmetries.

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Jordan François, Lucrezia Ravera. 2024-04-26. On the Meaning of Local Symmetries: Epistemic-Ontological Dialectics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-025-00849-y

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