Rigidity, instability and dimensionality

Jon Pérez Laraudogoitia

pp. 4047-4062

in: Benjamin Bewersdorf, Jeanne Peijnenburg (eds), Epistemic justification, Synthese 195 (9), 2018.

Abstract

The paper takes a detailed look at a surprising new aspect of the dynamics of rigid bodies. Far from the usual consideration of rigid body theory as a merely technical chapter of classical physics, I demonstrate here that there are solutions to the conservation equations of mechanics that imply the spontaneous, unpredictable splitting of a rigid body in free rotation, something that has direct implications for the problem of causality. The paper also shows that the instability revealed in indeterminist splitting processes does not depend solely on the bodies’ inertial properties but also on the number of dimensions of the physical space they inhabit. The paper concludes with a conjecture on the behavior of rigid bodies in four-dimensional space.