The ontology of General Relativity
arXiv:1301.7330
Abstract
I discuss the ontological assumptions and implications of General Relativity. I maintain that General Relativity is a theory about gravitational fields, not about space-time. The latter is a more basic ontological category, that emerges from physical relations among all existents. I also argue that there are no physical singularities in space-time. Singular space-time models do not belong to the ontology of the world: they are not things but concepts, i.e. defective solutions of Einstein's field equations. I briefly discuss the actual implication of the so-called singularity theorems in General Relativity and some problems related to ontological assumptions of Quantum Gravity.
20 pages, 1 figure, review article to be published in Mario Novello and Santiago E. Perez Bergliaffa (eds.) "Cosmology and Gravitation", Cambridge University Press, lecture notes of the BSCG XV