Determinism and General Relativity
@article{Smeenk2020DeterminismAG, title={Determinism and General Relativity}, author={Christopher Smeenk and Christian W{\"u}thrich}, journal={Philosophy of Science}, year={2020}, volume={88}, pages={638 - 664} }
We investigate the fate of determinism in general relativity (GR), comparing the philosopher’s account with the physicist’s well-posed initial value formulations. The fate of determinism is interwoven with the question of what it is for a spacetime to be ‘physically reasonable’. A central concern is the status of global hyperbolicity, a putatively necessary condition for determinism in GR. While global hyperbolicity may fail to be true of all physically reasonable models, we analyze whether…
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