As one might expect, for practising physicists an interest in Science Studies or philosophical issues concerning science arises from their scientific work and cannot be separated from it. In Jose Vargas's case, philosophical issues arise as he questions the relations of geometry to General Relativity. On the choice of the right kind of geometry, he argues, a system of self-consistent analytic statements becomes a synthetic description of the world: geometry becomes a natural science, a kind of mechanics. Einstein himself did not choose the most appropriate geometrization which Vargas bases on the work of Cartan. Some of Jose's paper-titles (some of them co-authored with Douglas Torr) afford clues: "Finslerian structures: The Cartan-Clifton method of the moving frame" (J. Math. Phys. vol. 34, October 1993, 4898- 4913); "The Cornerstone of the Role of the Torsion in Finslerian Physical Worlds" (General Relativity and Gravitation, vol. 27, No. 6, 1995, 629-644); "Conservation of Vector-valued Forms and the Question of the Existence of Gravitational Energy- momentum in General Relativity" General Relativity and Gravitation, vol. 23, No. 6, 1991, 713-732); "On the Geometrization of Electrodynamics" (Foundations of Physics, vol. 21, no. 4, 1991, 379-401); and the two-part article "Geometrization of the Physics with Teleparallelism" (Foundations of Physics, vol. 22, no. 4, 1992, 507- 547).
Jose's view of geometry as a natural science involves us in rationalist conceptions of nature which are as old as science itself. "Nature," he said (quoting Einstein, if I remember correctly), "is the realization of the simplest mathematical ideas." This may be a metaphysical conviction or an aesthetic working hypothesis. Indeed, aesthetic considerations enter into some of his work. For example, if "several unaesthetic features of General Relativity" appear not only in the traditional but also in the proposed geometrization, they "should be viewed as real problems, and not as necessary concomitants of the geometrization." This gives rise to questions concerning the values of economy of thought, of simplicity and elegance, their relation to aesthetic and metaphyiscal norms (and where do they come from?!). More concretely, Jose also addressed the philosophical difference between Reichenbach/Grünbaum and Mario Bunge on the conventionality of 'simultaneity': it seems that Jose's project can be understood also as an attempt to reconstruct General Relativity on a conception of absolute (real?) simultaneity - what kind of geometry would yield this reconstruction?
Alfred Nordmann
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