Historical and Philosophical Insights about General Relativity and Space-time from Particle Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical, philosophical, and scientific developments of General Relativity and space-time, emphasizing the role of massive spin 2 gravity theories and their implications for understanding gravity and geometry.

Contribution

It provides a historical and philosophical analysis of massive gravity theories, highlighting their potential to challenge geometric empiricism and their renewed relevance in modern physics.

Findings

Massive gravity theories support conventionalism over geometric empiricism.

Nonuniqueness in field equations allows explanations of geometry without vice versa.

Recent advances suggest massive spin 2 gravity may be viable again.

Abstract

Historians recently rehabilitated Einstein's "physical strategy" for General Relativity (GR). Independently, particle physicists similarly re-derived Einstein's equations for a massless spin 2 field. But why not a light \emph{massive} spin 2, like Neumann and Seeliger did to Newton? Massive gravities are bimetric, supporting conventionalism over geometric empiricism. Nonuniqueness lets field equations explain geometry but not \emph{vice versa}. Massive gravity would have blocked Schlick's critique of Kant's synthetic \emph{a priori}. Finally in 1970 massive spin 2 gravity seemed unstable or empirically falsified. GR was vindicated, but later and on better grounds. However, recently dark energy and theoretical progress have made massive spin 2 gravity potentially viable again.