Fields as Bodies: a unified presentation of spacetime and internal gauge symmetry

Abstract

Using the parametrised representation of field theory (in which the location in spacetime of a part of a field is itself represented by a map from the base manifold to Minkowski spacetime) I demonstrate that in both local and global cases, internal (Yang-Mills-type) and spacetime (Poincar\'{e}) symmetries can be treated precisely on a par, so that gravitational theories may be regarded as gauge theories in a completely standard sense.