Simultaneity, conventialism, general covariance, and the special theory of relativity
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Simultaneity, conventialism, general covariance, and the special theory of relativity
zbMATH Open document ID: 0615.53062
DOI: 10.1007/BF00760649
author: Peter Havas
published in: General Relativity and Gravitation
publication date: 1987-01-01T00:00:00Z
review text: In a recent article, De Ritis and Guccioni claimed to give an easy way of falsifying the conventionalist interpretation of the definition of simultaneity of distant events within an inertial system. For a particular closed light path, they derived a necessary condition and claimed that it could be violated by a nonstandard choice of the definition of simultaneity. It is pointed out here that (as shown by many authors) the possibility of a nonstandard definition is implicitly contained in a generally covariant formulation of the special theory of relativity, and it is shown that conditions such as the one they derived are satisfied automatically. The most general position-independent definition of simultaneity is given, and an example of a position-as well as direction-dependent definition is exhibited in an Appendix. A number of objections against the possibility of a nonstandard definition of simultaneity raised by various authors are discussed and are found to lack any physical or mathematical justification.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 53B50
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 83A05
zbMATH DE Number: 3996588
zbMATH Keywords: simultaneity
zbMATH Keywords: special theory of relativity
MaRDI profile type: Publication
cites work: Q3662220
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3996588