Eliminativism and the QCD $$\theta _{\text {YM}}$$-Term: What Gauge Transformations Cannot Do
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The eliminative view of gauge degrees of freedom—the view that they arise solely from descriptive redundancy and are therefore eliminable from the theory—is a lively topic of debate in the philosophy of physics. Recent work attempts to leverage properties of the QCD $$\theta _{\text {YM}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>θ</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>YM</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -term to provide a novel argument against the eliminative view. The argument is based on the claim that the QCD $$\theta _{\text {YM}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>θ</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>YM</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -term changes under “large” gauge transformations. Here we review geometrical propositions about fiber bundles that unequivocally falsify these claims: the $$\theta _{\text {YM}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>θ</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>YM</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -term encodes topological features of the fiber bundle used to represent gauge degrees of freedom, but it is fully gauge-invariant. Nonetheless, within the essentially classical viewpoint pursued here, the physical role of the $$\theta _{\text {YM}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>θ</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>YM</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> </mml:math> -term shows the physical importance of bundle topology (or superpositions thereof) and thus counts against (a naive) eliminativism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it