Hilbert's ‘Foundations of Physics’: Gravitation and electromagnetism within the axiomatic method

Abstract

In November and December 1915, Hilbert presented two communications to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences under the common title ‘The Foundations of Physics’. Versions of each eventually appeared in the Nachrichten of the Academy. Hilbert's first communication has received significant reconsideration in recent years, following the discovery of printer's proofs of this paper, dated 6 December 1915. The focus has been primarily on the ‘priority dispute’ over the Einstein field equations. Our contention, in contrast, is that the discovery of the December proofs makes it possible to see the thematic linkage between the material that Hilbert cut from the published version of the first communication and the content of the second, as published in 1917. The latter has been largely either disregarded or misinterpreted, and our aim is to show that (a) Hilbert's two communications should be regarded as part of a wider research program within the overarching framework of ‘the axiomatic method’ (as Hilbert expressly stated was the case), and (b) the second communication is a fine and coherent piece of work within this framework, whose principal aim is to address an apparent tension between general invariance and causality (in the precise sense of Cauchy determination), pinpointed in Theorem I of the first communication. This is not the same problem as that found in Einstein's ‘hole argument’—something that, we argue, never confused Hilbert.