1302.1686 (James Owen Weatherall et al.)

The Geometry of Conventionality    [PDF]

James Owen Weatherall, John Byron Manchak

Hans Reichenbach famously argued that the geometry of spacetime is conventional in relativity theory, in the sense that one can freely choose the spacetime metric so long as one is willing to postulate a "universal force field". Here we make precise a sense in which the field Reichenbach defines fails to be a "force". We then argue that there is an interesting and perhaps tenable sense in which geometry is conventional in classical spacetimes. We conclude with a no-go result showing that the variety of conventionalism available in classical spacetimes does not extend to relativistic spacetimes.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.1686