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Register a new userEquivalence and Duality in Electromagnetism
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James Owen Weatherall
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In this paper I bring the recent philosophical literature on theoretical equivalence to bear on dualities in physics. Focusing on electromagnetic duality, which is a simple example of S-duality in string theory, I will show that the duality fits naturally into at least one framework for assessing equivalence---that of categorical equivalence---but that it fails to meet a necessary condition for equivalence on that account. The reason is that the duality does not preserve empirical content in the required sense; instead, it takes models to models with dual empirical content. I conclude by discussing how one might react to this.
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I review the philosophical literature on the question of when two physical theories are equivalent. This includes a discussion of empirical equivalence, which is often taken to be necessary, and sometimes taken to be sufficient, for theoretical equivalence; and interpretational equivalence, which is the idea that two theories are equivalent just in case they have the same interpretation. It also includes a discussion of several formal notions of equivalence that have been considered in the recent philosophical literature, including (generalized) definitional equivalence and categorical equivalence. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between equivalence and duality.
In recent years philosophers of science have explored categorical equivalence as a promising criterion for when two (physical) theories are equivalent. On the one hand, philosophers have presented several examples of theories whose relationships seem to be clarified using these categorical methods. On the other hand, philosophers and logicians have studied the relationships, particularly in the first order case, between categorical equivalence and other notions of equivalence of theories, including definitional equivalence and generalized definitional (aka Morita) equivalence. In this article, I will express some skepticism about this approach, both on technical grounds and conceptual ones. I will argue that category structure (alone) likely does not capture the structure of a theory, and discuss some recent work in light of this claim.
We give an introductory review of gauge/gravity duality, and associated ideas of holography, emphasising the conceptual aspects. The opening Sections gather the ingredients, viz. anti-de Sitter spacetime, conformal field theory and string theory, that we need for presenting, in Section 5, the central and original example: Maldacenas AdS/CFT correspondence. Sections 6 and 7 develop the ideas of this example, also in applications to condensed matter systems, QCD, and hydrodynamics. Sections 8 and 9 discuss the possible extensions of holographic ideas to de Sitter spacetime and to black holes. Section 10 discusses the bearing of gauge/gravity duality on two philosophical topics: the equivalence of physical theories, and the idea that spacetime, or some features of it, are emergent.
We derive basic equations of electromagnetic fields in fractal media which are specified by three indepedent fractal dimensions {alpha}_{i} in the respective directions x_{i} (i=1,2,3) of the Cartesian space in which the fractal is embedded. To grasp the generally anisotropic structure of a fractal, we employ the product measure, so that the global forms of governing equations may be cast in forms involving conventional (integer-order) integrals, while the local forms are expressed through partial differential equations with derivatives of integer order but containing coefficients involving the {alpha}_{i}s. First, a formulation based on product measures is shown to satisfy the four basic identities of vector calculus. This allows a generalization of the Green-Gauss and Stokes theorems as well as the charge conservation equation on anisotropic fractals. Then, pursuing the conceptual approach, we derive the Faraday and Amp`ere laws for such fractal media, which, along with two auxiliary null-divergence conditions, effectively give the modified Maxwell equations. Proceeding on a separate track, we employ a variational principle for electromagnetic fields, appropriately adapted to fractal media, to independently derive the same forms of these two laws. It is next found that the parabolic (for a conducting medium) and the hyperbolic (for a dielectric medium) equations involve modified gradient operators, while the Poynting vector has the same form as in the non-fractal case. Finally, Maxwells electromagnetic stress tensor is reformulated for fractal systems. In all the cases, the derived equations for fractal media depend explicitly on fractal dimensions and reduce to conventional forms for continuous media with Euclidean geometries upon setting the dimensions to integers.
This paper follows in the tradition of direct-acti
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