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The
seminar is held in hybrid
format, in person (Múzeum
krt. 4/i Room 224) and
online at the following
link:
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| 9
October (Friday) 4:15
PM Room 224 + ONLINE
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Balázs
Gyenis
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Institute of Philosophy, ELTE
Research Centre for the
Humanities
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| A
"zero principles",
operationally verifiable
approach to special
relativity
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I outline a novel
approach to special relativity
that does not assume the principle
of relativity, the light
postulate, a pre-given notion of
inertiality, group theoretical
properties of transformations, or
Minkowski spacetime. The basic
mathematical structure can be
interpreted as a specification of
a set of agents, the type of
actions they can perform, and the
type of observations they can
make, and under this
interpretation the truth of every
needed assumption is completely
determined by information
available to an agent. The
assumptions are strong enough to
entail Minkowskian kinematics
(relativity of simultaneity,
reciprocal length contraction,
time dilation, relativistic
velocity addition, interval
invariance, and so on), yet weak
enough to leave rest, the
dynamical behavior of rods and
clocks, a speed that limits causal
processes, and background
chronogeometry underdetermined. In
particular, the assumptions are
weak enough that they have
philosophically interesting
unintended models: on the one
hand, they are compatible with
Newtonian physics (where in one
frame of reference a signal - that
does not need to be light -
propagates homogeneously and
isotropically), and on the other
hand, they are compatible with
globally conformally distorted
Minkowski spacetimes in which the
principle of relativity does not
hold. The mathematical basis of
the approach is a new
Alexandrov-type rigidity theorem
on a cone.
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| 16
October (Friday) 4:15
PM Room 224 + ONLINE
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Diego
Arana
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Institute
of Philosophy, ELTE Research
Centre for the Humanities
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| The
Mentaculus and its Limits
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Statistical
Mechanical Imperialism is a thesis
defended by Albert and Loewer. It
holds that the laws and
probabilities of the special
sciences — sciences like biology,
geology, economics, etc. — can in
principle be recovered from
microphysics together with a small
set of statistical-mechanical
postulates. The resulting system,
known as the Mentaculus, assigns
probabilities to special-science
propositions via a measure over
the set of physically possible
initial microstates. I argue that
this strategy relies on a
substantive but largely
unacknowledged assumption: that
special-science propositions
correspond to measurable subsets
of phase space. I call this the
Probabilistic Representability
Requirement (PRR). I will argue
that the PRR neither follows from
the core commitments of the
Mentaculus nor enjoys independent
justification; without it, the
framework’s explanatory ambitions
cannot be sustained.
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