This is an episode about “relationality” and what spacetime is made of.
Lucrezia Ravera is a researcher in theoretical physics in the Department of Applied Science and Technology at the Polytechnic University of Turin, where she also took her PhD in 2018, on the hidden group-theoretical structure of supergravity in higher dimensions. She now leads GrIFOS, a project on off-shell supergravity in superspace that runs to 2028. She (along with Jordan François) have spent the last few years building the dressing field method into a general framework for relational physics: a way of extracting what is physical out of a gauge theory without ever fixing a gauge. Their paper Geometric relational framework for general-relativistic gauge field theories goes over everything in detail.
We cover:
What relationality is, and why it is not relativity (and not relativism)
Einstein’s hole argument, the point-coincidence argument, and the table and tablecloth she uses to picture a diffeomorphism
Gauge fixing, …
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