Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics: Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel

ISBN-13: 9781402012853 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 650 str.

Ashtekar

Opis

2) the globalization of capital has far outstripped the ability of current labor movements, organized at best on a national level, to conduct an effective defense of the interests of labor within capitalism, let alone to seriously challenge the cap italist system. To develop some form-or forms--of international organization of labor, long an ideological challenge ("Workers of the World Unite") has now become an urgent matter of survival for the labor movements of the world. Here is a challenge, on which I think broad agreement is possible: Even those who think capitalism is capable of indefinite survival must agree that it has functioned best in the past-for example, during the long period of post-World War II expansion when the power of capital has been effectively limited by the countervailing power of labor. Effective exercise of that power has always depended on overcoming the seg mentation of labor due to such factors as locality, race, gender, occupation, etc., which stilIremain important. Above, I have singled out the two factors that today seem key to me: the split between mental and manual labor, and segmentation by nationality. Let all concerned about the current state of capitalism work to build up the countervailing power of labor, and let time show whether this results in nothing more than the better functioning of capitalism, or whether a new challenge to the system ultimately emerges."

Spis treści

I: Historical and Philosophical Roots of Relativity.- The Prehistory of Relativity.- Interpretations and Equations of the Michelson Experiment and its Variations.- The Trouton Experiment, E = mc2, and a Slice of Minkowski Space-Time.- The N-Stein Family.- Eclipses of the Stars: Mandl, Einstein, and the Early History of Gravitational Lensing.- The Varieties of Unity: Sounding Unified Theories 1920–1930.- Indiscernibles, General Covariance, and Other Symmetries: The Case for Non-Reductive Relationalism.- On Relative Orbital Rotation in Relativity Theory.- II: Foundational Issues in Relativity and their Advancement.- The Unique Nature of Cosmology.- Time, Structure, and Evolution in Cosmology.- Timekeeping in an Expanding Universe.- Gravitational Lensing from a Space-Time Perspective.- Rigidly Rotating Disk Revisted.- DSS 2+2.- Geometry, Null Hypersurfaces and New Variables.- On Vacuum Twisting Type-N Again.- Quasi-Local Energy.- Space-Time Defects: Open and Closed Shells Revisited.- Dimensionally Challenged Gravities.- A Note on Holonomic Constraints.- Towards an Action-at-a-Distance Concept of Spacetime.- III: Foundational Issues in Quantum Physics and their Advancement.- Inevitability, Inseparability and Gedanken Measurement.- The Concept of Quantum State: New Views on Old Phenomena.- Elementary Processes.- On Quantum Non-Locality, Special Relativity, and Counterfactual Reasoning.- Coherence, Entanglement, and Reductionist Explanation in Quantum Physics.- IV: Science, History, and the Challenges of Progress.- Physics and Science Fiction.- Can We Learn From History? Do We Want To?.- Patterns of Appropriation in the Greek Intellectual Life of the 18th Century: Case Study on the Notion of Time.- Darwin, Marx, and Warranted Progress: Materialism and Views of Development in Nineteenth-Century Germany.- Albert Einstein and the Founding of Brandeis University.- John Stachel’s Publications.