Shape Dynamics Relativity and Relationalism

by Mercati, Flavio

• ISBN13: 9780198789482
• ISBN10: 0198789483
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-05-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Flavio Mercati, Postdoctoral Fellow, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada

Flavio Mercati completed his Ph.D. at the University of Rome `La Sapienza' in 2011 with a thesis on experimental tests of quantum gravity and on effective models of quantum gravity based on noncommutative field theory. He spent one year at the University of Zaragoza in Spain as a postdoctoral fellow, and another 7 months visiting the University of Nottingham in the UK. Since 2012 he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada. Mercati has published around 30 scientific articles and three essays. In 2015 he won the Buchalter Prize for Cosmology for his research on the arrow of time. This work has received considerable attention by the media, leading to interviews by popular science journals like Wired, Scientific American, Le Scienze and Discovery News.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
I. Historical Motivation
2. Newton's bucket
3. Origins of the Mach-Poincare Principle
II. Relational Particle Dynamics
4. Barbour-Bertotti best matching
5. Best matching: Technical details
6. Hamiltonian formulation
III. Relational Field Theory
7. Relativity without Relativity
8. York's solution to the initial-value problem
9. A derivation of Shape Dynamics
10. Cotton-squared theory
IV. Shape Dynamics
11. Historical interlude
12. Shape Dynamics and the Linking Theory
13. Solutions of Shape Dynamics
V. Appendices
A. Arnowitt-Deser-Misner Gravity
B. Other appendices