Steve Wilburn | Searcharxiv

arXiv2016

Global versus Local -- Mach's Principle versus the Equivalence Principle

The equivalence principle is the conceptual basis for general relativity. In contrast Mach's principle, although said to have been influential on Einstein in his formulation of general relativity, has not been shown to be central to the structure of general relativity. In this essay we suggest that the quantum effects of Hawking and Unruh radiation are a manifestation of a {\it thermal} Mach's principle, where the local thermodynamic properties of the system are determined by the non-local structure of the quantum fields which determine the vacuum of a given spacetime. By comparing Hawking and Unruh temperatures for the same local acceleration we find a violation of the Einstein elevator version of the equivalence principle, which vanishes in the limit that the horizon is approached.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2012

Exercices de style: a homotopy theory for set theory, I

We construct a model category (in the sense of Quillen) for set theory, starting from two arbitrary, but natural, conventions. It is the simplest category satisfying our conventions and modelling the notions of finiteness, countability and infinite equi-cardinality. In a subsequent paper \cite{GaHa1} we give a homotopy theoretic dictionary of set theoretic concepts, most notably Shelah's covering number $\cov(λ, \aleph_1,\aleph_1,2)$, recovered from this model category. We argue that from the homotopy theoretic point of view our construction is essentially automatic following basic existing methods, and so is (almost all) the verification that the construction works.

math.LO↗