TY - JOUR
T1 - Symmetries as by-products of conserved quantities
AU - Romero-Maltrana, Diego
N1 - Funding Information:
I am grateful to many conversations on this topic and revision to previous draft made by Pablo Razeto, Pablo Acuña and Federico Benitez, and to several observations made by an anonymous referee that helped to improve substantially the text. I finally acknowledge the financial support given by FONDECYT Grant no. 1150661 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2015/11/1
Y1 - 2015/11/1
N2 - There is general consensus among physicists in considering symmetries as a source of conserved quantities, a conclusion allegedly supported by Emmy Noether's theorems. Recently it has been pointed out that no arrow of explanation can be extracted from Noether's work, and there are also criticisms against the priority of particular symmetries over specific conserved quantities under Noether's ideas, but there are no general arguments against the aforementioned consensus, nor proposals promoting an explanation that leads from conserved quantities to symmetries. In this paper a general argument is built which favours conserved quantities over symmetries inasmuch as the presence of the former seems to allow (i.e. it seems to be a sufficient condition leading to) symmetrical descriptions.
AB - There is general consensus among physicists in considering symmetries as a source of conserved quantities, a conclusion allegedly supported by Emmy Noether's theorems. Recently it has been pointed out that no arrow of explanation can be extracted from Noether's work, and there are also criticisms against the priority of particular symmetries over specific conserved quantities under Noether's ideas, but there are no general arguments against the aforementioned consensus, nor proposals promoting an explanation that leads from conserved quantities to symmetries. In this paper a general argument is built which favours conserved quantities over symmetries inasmuch as the presence of the former seems to allow (i.e. it seems to be a sufficient condition leading to) symmetrical descriptions.
KW - Conserved quantities
KW - Noether's theorems
KW - Symmetries
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84948823839&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.10.006
DO - 10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.10.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84948823839
VL - 52
SP - 358
EP - 368
JO - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
JF - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
SN - 1355-2198
ER -