Pushing Einstein's Principles to the Extreme

Abstract

In these lectures I propose to push Einstein's principle of coordinate independence to the extreme in order to restrict the possible form of fundamental equations of motion in physics. I start from nearly tautological system theoretic axioms. They provide a minimal amount of a priori structure which is thought to be characteristic of human thinking in general. It is shown how formal discretizations of Maxwell and Yang Mills theory in flat space and of general relativity in Ashtekar variables fit into this frame work.