Meetings

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

Previous seminars >

Fourth Oxford Mini-course: Anthropics, Selection Effects and Fine-Tuning in Cosmology

St Anne’s College, Oxford, 2-4 December, 2013

Lectures by Nima Arkani-Hamed (institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Nick Bostrom (James Martin School, Oxford), Christopher Smeenk (University of Western Ontario), and Jean-Philippe Uzan (CNRS, Paris).

 

This mini-course will be about fine-tuning and anthropic reasoning in cosmology: about the variability of physical constants, the consequences of such variations, and how to compensate — and recalibrate probabilities accordingly — for the fact that the observations that we make are necessarily of a region in the universe in which their values make our existence possible.

Schedule of lectures

The lectures on Tuesday 3rd December will be followed by a conference dinner at St. Anne’s at 7.00 p.m., with a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed.

The mini-course is followed by a one-day workshop on the same topic on Thursday 5th December, also at St Anne’s, with talks by Bernard Carr (Queen Mary, London), Fay Dowker (Imperial, London), George Ellis (Cape Town), Andrew Liddle (Edinburgh), Jesus Mosterin (Barcelona), John Peacock (Edinburgh), and David Sloane (Cambridge).

Workshop schedule

 

Attendance of the lectures and workshop is free, but registration is required, as space is limited.

Register now for the mini-course

Register now for the workshop

Purchase (£25) a place at the conference dinner

 

You can find accommodation at Oxford Rooms.

Philosophy of Physics research seminars Michaelmas Term 2013

Convened by Harvey Brown

The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-6, in the Lecture Room of the Philosophy Centre. In week 7, in place of the Thursday seminar, see Relativity Meets Quantum Theory at the LSE, Nov 28-29th (Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, LSE), and Irreversibility in Axiomatic Thermodynamics, Nov 30 (Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge). In week 8, in place of the Thursday seminar, see Anthropics: selection effects and fine-tuning in cosmology (miniseries as part of the ‘Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology’ initiative, at St Anne’s College, Oxford University).

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 17 October: Edward Anderson, DAMPT, Cambridge

Background independence

Thu 24 October: Basil Hiley, Birkbeck College, London

Bohmian non-commutative dynamics: local conditional expectation values are weak values

Thu 31 October: Paul Hoyningen-Heune, Leibniz University of Hannover

The dead end objection against convergent realisms

Thu 7 November: Sam Fletcher, University of California at Irvine

On the reduction of General Relativity to Newtonian gravitation

Thu 14 November: Jeffrey Bub, University of Maryland

Quantum Interactions with Closed Timelike Curves and Superluminal Signaling  

Thu 21 November: Owen Maroney, Oxford

How is there a physics of information?

Thu 28 November: No Seminar

Thu 5 December: No Seminar

Previous seminars >

Two Conferences on the Foundations of Physics: Cambridge-London-Oxford

Relativity Meets Quantum Theory at the LSE 28-29th Nov 2013
Irreversibility in Axiomatic Thermodynamics 30th Nov 2013

the aim with these two conferences is not only to do two workshops on cutting edge topics, but to recognize the collaboration and mutual support between three communities of philosophers of physics: Cambridge, London, and Oxford.

Organizers: Adam Caulton, Eleanor Knox, Bryan W. Roberts, David Wallace.

More information >

Third Oxford Mini-course: Cosmology and Quantum Foundations

10-12 June, 2013

St Anne’s College, Oxford

Quantum theory as originally formulated could only be applied given a classically-described experimental context. As such, can it be applied to the description of the universe as a whole? How should it be formulated so that it can yield a quantum theory of cosmology? Is such a description even needed? What problems in cosmology might be solved in this way? This minicourse examines these questions from the perspective of many-worlds theory, pilot-wave theory, and the relational interpretation of quantum theory, with lectures from leading advocates of each. Continue reading →

Rutgers Conference: Structure in Physics

April 29-30 2013

Structure in Physics is a two-day conference at Rutgers University examining the relationship between physics and metaphysics.  We will bring together leading researchers in the philosophy of physics to discuss the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and cosmology.  This conference is organized by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer as part of the interuniversity Cosmology Project.

More information >