Meetings
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars TT 2015
Convened by Oliver Pooley
The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 2-8 ( note that there is no seminar week 1) in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.
Abstracts are posted weekly.
Thu 30th April (week 1): NO SEMINAR
Thu 7th May (week 2): Mauro Dorato (University of Rome Roma Tre)
The passage of time between physics and psychology
Thu 14th May (week 3): Harvey Brown (Oxford) and Chris Timpson (Oxford)
Bell on Bell’s theorem: the changing face of nonlocality
Thu 21st May (week 4): Francesca Vidotto (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
Relational ontology from General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
Thu 28th May (week 5): George Ellis (Cape Town)
On the crucial role of top-down causation in complex systems
Thu 4th June (week 6): Neil Dewar (Oxford)
Symmetry and Interpretation: or, Translations and Translations
Thu 11th June (week 7): Tom Pashby (University of Southern California)
Saving Schroedinger’s cat: It’s about time (not measurement)
Thu 18th June (week 8): George Darby (Oxford)
Safe bets in analytic and naturalised metaphysics
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars HT 2015
Convened by Harvey Brown
The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8, EXCEPT for week 3 and week 8, in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.
Abstracts are posted weekly.
Thu 22nd Jan (week 1): Jonathan Halliwell (Imperial College London)
Negative Probabilities, Fine’s Theorem and Quantum Histories
Thu 29th Jan (week 2): Raymond Lal (Cambridge/Oxford)
The topology of contextuality: a new perspective on quantum no-go theorems
Thu 5th Feb (week 3): NO SEMINAR
Thu 12th Feb (week 4): Erik Curiel (Munich)
Problems with the interpretation of energy conditions in general relativity
Thu 19th Feb (week 5): David Wallace (Oxford)
Fields as Bodies: a unified treatment of spacetime and gauge symmetry
Thu 26th Feb (week 6): James Ladyman (Bristol)
Do local symmetries have ‘direct empirical consequences’?
Thu 5th Mar (week 7): Nicholas Teh (Cambridge)
Theoretical Equivalence in Classical Mechanics: A Prolegomenon to Duality
12th Mar (week 8): NO SEMINAR
Lakatos Award Workshop October 21 2014
The workshop will be held in the Lakatos Building, Portugal Street, London, under the auspices of the LSE Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method and the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences (CPNSS)
No registration is necessary: the workshop is open to all-comers
10.00-11.15: Eleanor Knox
How to make peace with holography
11.15-11.35: coffee break
11.35-12.50: Gordon Belot
50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong
12.50-14.15: break for lunch
14.15-15.30: Nicholas Teh
Gauge theories and holism
15.30-15.50: coffee break
15.50-17.05: Laura Ruetsche
The unreasonable effectiveness of non-fundamental physics
17.05-18.20: David Wallace
Fields as bodies: a unified treatment of spacetime and gauge symmetries
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars Michaelmas Term 2014
Convened by Simon Saunders
The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8, EXCEPT for week 5, in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.
On Thu of week 5 (13 November), the first of the joint Bristol-London-Oxford-Cambridge (BLOC) seminars will take place at 5.30 p.m., Kings College, London. There will be no Oxford seminar on that date.
Abstracts are posted weekly.
Thu 16 Oct (week 1): Dennis Lehmkuhl (Oxford and Wuppertal):
Einstein, Cartan, Weyl, Jordan: The neighborhood of General Relativity in the space of spacetime theories
Thu 23rd Oct (week 2): Daniel Bedingham (Oxford):
Time reversal symmetry and collapse models
Thu 30th Oct (week 3): David Wallace (Oxford):
How not to do the metaphysics of quantum mechanics
Thu 6th Nov (week 4) : Vlatko Vedral (Oxford):
Macroscopicity
13th Nov (week 5) BLOC seminar: Huw Price (Cambridge):
Two paths to the Paris Intepretation
Thu 20th Nov (week 6): Boris Zilber (Oxford):
On the semantics of the canonical commutation relations
Thu 27th Nov (week 7): Owen Maroney (Oxford):
How epistemic can a quantum state be?
Thu 4th Dec (week 8): Tony Sudbery (York):
The logic of the future in the Everett-Wheeler understanding of quantum theory
Philosophy of Cosmology UK/US Conference
12th – 16th September 2014, Tenerife, Spain
Topics
What is Philosophy of Cosmology?
Quantum Foundations & Cosmology
String Theory
Inflation
Emergent Spacetime
Gravity
Initial Conditions
Arrow of time
Laws of Nature
Emergence of Structure
Fine-Tuning
Probabilities
Organisers
UK: Joe Silk, Simon Saunders, Khalil Chamcham (Oxford), John Barrow (Cambridge)
US: Barry Loewer (Rutgers), David Albert (Columbia)
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars Trinity Term 2014
Convened by Oliver Pooley
The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8, in the Lecture Room of the Philosophy Centre.
Please note the Centre’s NEW ADDRESS: Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG. (This is the old Radcliffe Infirmary building.) The Lecture Room is on the second floor.
Abstracts are posted weekly.
Thu 8 May (week 2): Simon Saunders (Oxford):
Reference to indistinguishable particles, and other paradoxes
Thu 15 May (week 3): Julian Barbour (Oxford)
A gravitational arrow of time
Thu 22 May (week 4): Elise Crull (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Whence physical significance in bimetric theories?
29 May(week 5): Adrian Kent (Cambridge)
A solution to the Lorentzian quantum reality problem
Thu 5 June (week 6): Mike Cuffaro (LMU, Munich)
Reconsidering quantum no-go theorems from a computational perspective
Thu 12 June (week 7): Antony Valentini (Clemson)
Hidden variables in the early universe: quantum nonequilibrium and the cosmic microwave background
Thu 19 June (week 8): Antony Valentini (Clemson)
Hidden variables in the early universe: towards an explanation for large-scale cosmic anomalies
The Structure of Gravity and Space-Time: Oxford, 6-7 February 2014
‘The Structure of Gravity and Space-time’ is an international workshop, at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Attendance is by invitation only.
Slides and audio files will be posted in due course.
Schedule of talks, abstracts, and list of participants
Cosmology and the Constants of Nature: Cambridge 17-19 March 2014
The Constants of Nature are quantities, whose numerical values we know with the greatest experimental accuracy – but about the rationale for those values, we have the greatest ignorance. We might also ask if they are indeed constant in space and time, and investigate whether their values arise at random or are uniquely determined by some deep theory.
The talks are aimed at philosophers of physics but should also be of interest to a wide range of cosmologists. Speakers will introduce the physical constants that define the standard model of particle physics and cosmology together with the data that determine them, describe observational programmes that test the constancy of traditional ‘constants’, including the cosmological constant, and discuss how self-consistent theories of varying constants can be formulated.
Speakers:
John Barrow, University of Cambridge
John Ellis, King’s College London
Pedro Ferreira, University of Oxford
Joao Magueijo, Imperial College, London
Thanu Padmanabhan, IUCAA, Pune
Martin Rees, University of Cambridge
John Webb, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Registration is free and includes morning coffee and lunch.
Participants are requested to register at the conference website where the full programme of talks can also be found.
Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars Hilary Term 2014
Convened by Dennis Lehmkuhl
The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8, in the Lecture Room of the Philosophy Centre.
Please note the Centre’s NEW ADDRESS: Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG. (This is the old Radcliffe Infirmary building.) The Lecture Room is on the second floor.
Abstracts are posted weekly.
Thu 23 January (week 1): Peter Vickers (Durham):
Divide et impera realism and single slit diffraction: a reply to Brooker, Saatsi, and Vickers
Thu 30 January (week 2): David Wallace (Oxford):
Deflating the Aharonov-Bohm Effect
Thu 6 February (week 3): No seminar
Thu 13 February (week 4): Joerg Schmiedmayer :
How does the classical world emerge from microscopic quantum evolution?
Thu 20 February (Week 5): Domenico Giullini (Hannover and Bremen):
Gravitation and Quantum Mechanics
Thu 27 February (Week 6): Tessa Baker (Oxford):
Cosmological Tests of Gravity
Thu 6 March (Week 7): Sean Gryb (Perimeter Institute):
Symmetry and Evolution in Quantum Gravity
Thu 13 March (Week 8): Philip Goyal (SUNY):
An Informational Approach to Identical Particles in Quantum Theory
Thu 1 May (week 1 of TT): Oliver Pooley (Oxford):
New work on the problem of time