Sarita Rosenstock\, University of California\, Irvine
\nStructure and Equivalence in Classical Field Theories
Scientists and philosophers often invoke parsimony as a theoretical virtue alongside descriptive accuracy\, and aim to minimize the amount of structure present in a physical theory as much as possible. But it&rsquo\;s not always clear what it means to reduce structure in a physical theory\, or how one would go about doing so. I present a proposal for formalizing structure comparison in physics using category theory\, which can be thought of as the mathematical theory of structure. I&rsquo\;ll then show how this method helps elucidate a number of interesting and important issues in the foundations of classical field theories\, including general relativity and Yang-Mills theory.