> On Dec 12, 2016, at 12:24 PM, Benjamin Udell <baud...@gmail.com> wrote: > > My impression is that Smolin has drawn on some Peircean ideas, such as that > of habits or laws evolving in nature, but that he is less Peircean than he > initially seems, what with Smolin's views on discrete space and on the > relationship between math and physics. - Best, Ben >
I think his Peircean elements are more methadological. However one can be Peircean and adopt a theory of space that isn’t continuous due to the physics. If that’s what you mean) In any case space in LQG is a bit more complex than you suggest here. Although I’ll confess it’s been ages since I last looked into LQG. My impression was that its problems meant it seemed like a dead end - although perhaps that’s incorrect. It’s in his more methadological writings in Physics Today or his various books where he injects the most Peirce. One can of course accept continuity while simultaneously thinking particular systems include discontinuities. Getting back to LQG my fuzzy memory (again I’ve not really looked at this closely in nearly 15 years - and even then it was a bit beyond my knowledge) is that the discontinuities end up being tied to various gauge connections that then lead to “atom-like” phenomena. Many of those pursuing these avenues had a philosophical attraction to Leibniz rather than Newton in terms of basic ontology. (Einstein largely followed Leibniz as I think too did Mach although I may be wrong on that - again distant memory) My recollection is that Smolin and others just wanted to see what would happen if you didn’t *assume* space was continuous ala Newtonian substantial spacetime models. In GR this is a long interesting question and the Hole Problem was tied to this thought process and whether one could achieve a Leibniz monad type solution ala Einstein. An other way of putting the problem is to ask how background dependent ones model is. So it’s not really so much injecting a break with continuity than it is just not assuming continuity. The question then becomes what the equations suggest about spacetime. Is it a certain *type* of continuity or not? Without getting into the nuances of the theory (which I’ll confess I just don’t recall well) my sense is that all this is fairly independent of Peirce’s notions of continuity. Much as in the pre-Einstein era one could make arguments for Newton or Leibniz from a Peircean perspective. (After all there’s a sort of continuity in Leibniz as well) It is true though that in LQG you end up with spin networks where the nodes are more or less a cubic Planck length. But again, one has to be cautious here in taking that as an atom in the normal sense. Further as I recall, these spin networks while relating to the geometry of space aren’t the same thing as space. i.e. contra some I’m not sure they give an ontology of spacetime. Rather the probabilities of changes in the networks produce spacetime foam which is measured spacetime. But that’s not the same thing as Leibnizean monads. Further one might argue along the same lines as one argues for Planck length in traditional QM that this tells us about measurement but not reality (beyond the measurable structures). Time and space are emergent and emergent out of something non-continuous. But of course LQG wasn’t as productive as string theory and even string theory has lost its favor. So I’m not sure one should place too much faith on the basic notions here. To me the key thing is Smolin went where inquiry directed rather than forcing his theories to fit his expectations.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
