Nguyen, James, Teh, Nicholas J. and Wells, Laura
(2018)
Why surplus structure is not superfluous.
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
ISSN 0007-0882
Abstract
The idea that gauge theory has `surplus' structure poses a puzzle: in one much discussed sense, this structure is redundant; but on the other hand, it is also widely held to play an essential role in the theory. In this paper, we employ category-theoretic tools to illuminate an aspect of this puzzle. We precisify what is meant by `surplus' structure by means of functorial comparisons with equivalence classes of gauge fields, and then show that such structure is essential for any theory that represents a rich collection of physically relevant fields which are `local' in nature.
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