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A Modest Remark about Reichenbach, Rotation, and General Relativity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

David Malament
David Malament*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The University of Chicago
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Abstract

An interesting difficulty arises if one tries to reconcile Reichenbach's views about “absolute“ rotation in general relativity with his commitment to a “causal theory of space-time structure.” This difficulty is made precise in the form of a simple theorem about relativistic space-time geometry.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 615 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Michael Friedman, John Norton, Howard Stein, and Roberto Torretti for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

References

REFERENCES

Hawking, S. W., and Ellis, G. F. R. (1973), The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malament, D. (1977), “The Class of Continuous Timelike Curves Determines the Topology of Spacetime”, The Journal of Mathematical Physics 18: 1399–1404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichenbach, H. (1958), The Philosophy of Space and Time. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Wald, R. (1984), General Relativity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar