Fiber Bundles, Yang-Mills Theory, and General Relativity James Owen Weatherall Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 Abstract I articulate and discuss a geometrical interpretation of Yang-Mills theory. Analogies and disanalogies between Yang-Mills theory and general relativity are also considered. Keywords: Yang-Mills theory, general relativity, fiber bundle interpretation, holonomy interpretation 1. Introduction In recent philosophical discussions of (classical) Yang-Mills theory, a distinction is often made between “holonomy interpretations” of the theory and “fiber bundle interpretations”. Versions of the former have been carefully articulated and defended by, for instance, Belot (1998, 2003), Lyre (2004), and Healey (2001, 2004, 2007).1 The latter interpretation, mean- while, is usually counted as the “received view.” But like many received views, it is not perfectly clear where it has been received from—or, for that matter, what it amounts to. Some oft-cited sources include Wu and Yang (1975) and Trautman (1980), but these are written by and for working mathematicians and physicists, and neither takes on a distinc- tively “interpretive” posture. More recently, some philosophers, such as Maudlin (2007) and arXiv:1411.3281v2 [physics.hist-ph] 26 May 2015 Arntzenius (2012), have endorsed a fiber bundle interpretation—essentially by endorsing the fiber bundle formalism—and attempted to draw some philosophical morals regarding, for instance, classical property attribution. But these authors appear to take for granted that Email address:
[email protected] (James Owen Weatherall) 1Healey (2007) is now (already) the locus classicus for philosophy of Yang-Mills theory; the reader should refer there for an extensive discussion of the philosophical literature on the topic and for further references.