The Philosophy and Physics of Noether's Theorems

Nicholas Teh is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His primary research area is the intersection of philosophy, physics, and mathematics. He has been awarded several prestigious grants for his research, including two NSF fellowships. James Read is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is also currently Treasurer of the British Society for Philosophy of Science. He has won several international prizes in the Philosophy of Physics, including the Hanneke Janssen Prize and Clifton Memorial Prize.

Introduction James Read and Nicholas Teh; 1. The Noether theorems in context Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach; 2. Felix Klein and Emmy Noether on invariant theory and variational principles David Rowe; 3. Moscow, Oxford, or Princeton: The move from Göttingen Tomoko Kitagawa; 4. Getting to the bottom of Noether's theorem John Baez; 5. BV quantization in perturbative algebraic QFT: Fundamental concepts and perspectives Kasia Rejzner; 6. Divergence invariant variational problems Peter Olver; 7. Do symmetries 'explain' conservation laws? The modern converse Noether theorem versus pragmatism Harvey Brown; 8. Converse of Noether's first theorem and the energy-momentum tensor ambiguity problem Mark Baker, Niels Linnemann and Christopher Smeenk; 9. Noether's theorems and energy in general relativity Sebastian de Haro; 10. Geometric objects and perspectivalism James Read; 11. Substantive general covariance and the Einstein–Klein dispute: A Noetherian approach Laurent Freidel and Nicholas Teh; 12. Noether charges, gauge-invariance, and non-separability Henrique Gomes; 13. Observability, redundancy and modality for dynamical symmetry transformations David Wallace; 14. The gauge argument: A Noether reason Henrique Gomes, Bryan Roberts and Jeremy Butterfield.