Unification, geometry and ambivalence

Hilbert, Weyl and the Göttingen community

Skuli Sigurdsson

pp. 355-367

in: Kostas Gavroglu, Jean Christianidis, Efthymios Nicolaidis (eds), Trends in the historiography of science, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

According to this theory everything real, that is in the world, is a manifestation of the world metric; the physical concepts are no different from the geometrical ones. The only difference that exists between geometry and physics is, that geometry establishes in general what is contained in the nature of the metrical concepts, whereas it is the task for physics to determine the law and explore its consequences, according to which the real world is characterized among all the geometrically possible four-dimensional metric spaces.

Cited authors

Weyl Hermann

Hilbert David