Books about Indistinguishability from Amazon.com

This digital document is a journal article from Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In this essay, I examine the curved spacetime formulation of Newtonian gravity known as Newton-Cartan gravity and compare it with flat spacetime formulations. Two versions of Newton-Cartan gravity can be identified in the physics literature-a ''weak'' version and a ''strong'' version. The strong version has a constrained Hamiltonian formulation and consequently a well-defined gauge structure, whereas the weak version does not (with some qualifications). Moreover, the strong version is best compared with the structure of what Earman (World enough and spacetime. Cambridge: MIT Press) has dubbed Maxwellian spacetime. This suggests that there are also two versions of Newtonian gravity in flat spacetime-a ''weak'' version in Maxwellian spacetime, and a ''strong'' version in Neo-Newtonian spacetime. I conclude by indicating how these alternative formulations of Newtonian gravity impact the notion of empirical indistinguishability and the debate over scientific realism. .
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This digital document is a journal article from Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The concept of classical indistinguishability is analysed and defended against a number of well-known criticisms, with particular attention to the Gibbs' paradox. Granted that it is as much at home in classical as in quantum statistical mechanics, the question arises as to why indistinguishability, in quantum mechanics but not in classical mechanics, forces a change in statistics. The answer, illustrated with simple examples, is that the equilibrium measure on classical phase space is continuous, whilst on Hilbert space it is discrete. The relevance of names, or equivalently, properties stable in time that can be used as names, is also discussed. .
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