On the Meaning of Local Symmetries: Epistemic-Ontological Dialectics
arXiv:2404.17449 · doi:10.1007/s10701-025-00849-y
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.
21 pages
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- Raising galaxy rotation curves via dressing
- What can we do in a symmetry-constrained perspective? The importance of the total charge's status in quantum reference frame frameworks
- Mechanics as a general-relativistic gauge field theory, and Relational Quantization
- Toward Manifest Relationality in Transformers via Symmetry Reduction