Background-Independence

Understand

Intuitively speaking, a classical field theory is background-independent if the structure required to make sense of its equations is itself subject to dynamical evolution, rather than being imposed ab initio.

• The aim of this paper is to provide an explication of this intuitive notion.
• Background-independence is not a not formal property of theories: the question whether a theory is background-independent depends upon how the theory is interpreted.
• Under the approach proposed here, a theory is fully background-independent relative to an interpretation if each physical possibility corresponds to a distinct spacetime geometry; and it falls short of full background-independence to the extent that this condition fails.