Book review
Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics:
Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 234.
Edited by Abhay Ashtekar, Robert S. Cohen, Don
Howard, Jürgen Renn, Sahotra Sarkar, and Abner Shimony. 649 pp.
Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003. Price: $199. ISBN 1-4020-1284-5
American Journal of Physics - July 2004 - Volume 72,
Issue 7, pp. 974-975 - doi:10.1119/1.1761068
A general relativist trained in the 1950s, John Stachel is a seminal
figure in the philosophy and history of relativity of the last
quarter-century, and one of the rare physicists to have exercised such an
influence. The papers in his Festschrift, contributed by members of
what Stachel fondly calls his "intellectual family," bear witness to
this influence, addressing many of the subjects with which he has
wrestled over the years. Within the covers of this volume alone, the
Stachel family counts forty physicists, philosophers, and historians of
science.
The philosophy of physics is strongly represented in this
Festschrift, with contributions from ten leading practitioners,
including three papers concerning general relativity, and four on
questions of quantum physics. In keeping with the "family" theme,
few of these philosophers challenge positions taken by Stachel, the
exception being Simon Saunders, who takes him to task for his view
of the non-applicability to Newtonian gravity of the so-called "hole
argument" in general relativity. Other philosophers contributing to
the Festschrift choose topics tangentially related to those on which
Stachel has pronounced himself. David Malament's study of relative
rotation in relativity, for example, is related to Stachel's
reconstruction (1980) of Einstein's path to general relativity, which
highlights Einstein's desire to consider "rotation as rest." At the
same time, Malament provides a fine example of conceptual analysis in the
philosophy of spacetime.
Current topics in general relativity form the hard core of the volume,
with thirteen contributions on subjects ranging from DSS 2+2 (a method
for decomposing spacetime into two families of spacelike 2-surfaces
due to Stachel, R. d'Inverno, and J. Smallwood), to the rigidly
rotating disk (C. V. Vishveshwara), to gravitational lensing
(J. Ehlers, S. Frittelli, and E. Newman). The papers in this section are
aimed at an informed audience, much like the historical and
philosophical contributions; all are written in such a way that they
may be read with profit by anyone familiar with general relativity.
Completing the set are two surveys: one by G. F. R. Ellis on
cosmology in the last 35 years, the other on the action-at-a-distance
concept of spacetime, by Daniel Wesley and John Wheeler.
One of the most accessible and thought-provoking papers of the latter
set offers a wide-ranging reflection on the phenomena
of time in cosmology. As an alternative to the anthropic principle,
Lee Smolin speculates that some mechanism may be at work on a cosmological
scale, fixing the parameters of the standard model (assumed to be
dynamically determined) in such a way as to result in the observed
universe of high structural complexity, much as the theory of natural
selection in biology explains the existence of current life forms.
(Smolin's theory is developed at length in The Life of the
Cosmos, 1997.) Along the way, Smolin delves into the history of
time, and suggests that we consider Einstein's notion of relative time
in special relativity (operationally defined in 1900 to first-order in
by Henri Poincaré) as a turning point in the history of
physics, as it prepared the ground, in different ways, for both general
relativity and quantum field theory.
This sort of recourse to the history of physics is typical of the
philosophical contributions, in that facts are carefully selected in
order to construct a narrative of progress, or a "sense of history".
An eloquent argument in favor of a more rigorous approach to the
history of science is presented by Catherine Goldstein and Jim Ritter,
in their ground-breaking study of unified field theories (UFTs) in the
1920s. Goldstein and Ritter innovate on an historiographical level by
considering UFTs in relation to collective processes of
knowledge production. On the basis of quantitative publication data,
the authors seek answers to basic questions concerning, for example,
the relative importance of UFT research with respect to investigations
in the domains of relativity or quantum theory. This external approach
is complemented by a close reading of the original papers (in German,
French, English, and Italian), enabling Goldstein and Ritter to
disentangle the historical dynamics of their subject, while keeping
faith with its multi-faceted complexity. They resist, for instance, a
facile interpretation of UFT research based on a Kuhnian model of
discipline formation: while work on UFTs in the 1920s may be
considered mainstream, "normal" science, there were no unification
specialists, in contrast to the situation in, say, differential
geometry, or general relativity.
Among other results, Goldstein and Ritter find that the shape of UFTs
during their period of study was often a consequence of technical
constraints. A similar conclusion is arrived at by Michel Janssen, in
his study of the Trouton electrodynamical ether-drift experiment
(1902) and its aftermath. Janssen compares four explanations of the
observed null result: two pre-relativist accounts, based on Joseph
Larmor's electron theory (1902), and on Max Abraham's definition of
electromagnetic momentum (H.-A. Lorentz, 1904), and two modern
four-dimensional (Minkowskian) accounts, based on Max von Laue's
energy-momentum tensor (1911), and on Enrico Fermi's 1922 definition
of 4-momentum of spatially extended systems. Janssen finds the latter
explanation to be the best, but one has to wonder if Larmor, Lorentz,
or von Laue would have agreed with the analysis.
Given the broad range of topics, and the quality of the contributions
in this volume, an index would have been a particularly welcome
addition. My experience was that connections between the various
papers proved to be more numerous-and more profound-than I had
guessed from the table of contents alone. In this sense, John
Stachel's resolutely interdisciplinary family hangs together.
Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics is a
first-class source for the study of physics at the forefront of
historical and philosophical reflection.