Weyl's original scale geometry of 1918 ("purely infinitesimal geometry") was withdrawn by its author from physical theorizing in the early 1920s. It had a comeback in the last third of the 20th century in different contexts: scalar tensor theories of gravity, foundations of gravity, foundations of quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics, and cosmology. It seems that Weyl geometry continues to offer an open research potential for the foundations of physics even after the turn to the new millennium.1 Such an attempt seemed to be supported experimentally by the phenomenon of (Bjorken) scaling in deep inelastic electron-proton scattering experiments. The latter indicated, at first glance, an active scaling symmetry of mass/energy in high energy physics; but it turned out to hold only approximatively and was of restricted range. 19 See the discussion in (Quiros et al., 2013b) and (Scholz, 2017). 20 (Weyl, 1920) 21 Weyl's note (Weyl, 1921) became better known by his calculation and discussion of projective and conformal curvature tensors, which followed.22 See (Trautman, 2012).
This paper presents three aspects by which the Weyl geometric generalization of Riemannian geometry, and of Einstein gravity, sheds light on actual questions of physics and its philosophical reflection. After introducing the theory's principles, it explains how Weyl geometric gravity relates to Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory. We then discuss the link between gravity and the electroweak sector of elementary particle physics, as it looks from the Weyl geometric perspective. Weyl's hypothesis of a preferred scale gauge, setting Weyl scalar curvature to a constant, gets new support from the interplay of the gravitational scalar field and the electroweak one (the Higgs field). This has surprising consequences for cosmological models. In particular it leads to a static (Weyl geometric) spacetime with "inbuilt" cosmological redshift. This may be used for putting central features of the present cosmological model into a wider perspective.
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