Meetings

Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars Michaelmas Term 2016

Convened by Christopher Timpson

The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-3 and 5-8, in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.

Abstracts are posted weekly.

13th October (week 1): David Wallace (University of Southern California)
‘Fundamental and emergent geometry in Newtonian gravity’

20th October (week 2): Niels Martens (Oxford)
‘Against comparativism about mass’

27th October (week 3): Ryan Samaroo (Bristol)
‘The principle of equivalence as a criterion of identity’

3rd Novermber (week 4): NO SEMINAR

10th November (week 5): Lina Jansson (Nottingham)
‘Newton’s methodology meets Humean supervenience about laws of nature’

17th November (week 6): Jim Weatherall (UC Irvine)
‘On stuff: the field concept in classical physics’

24th November (week 7): David Glick (Oxford)
‘Entanglement swapping and entanglement realism’

1st December (week 8): David Sloan (Oxford, Physics)
‘Relationalism, entropy and the Big Bang’

Cosmology Seminars HT 2016

All seminars are in the BIPAC room, Denys Wilkinson Building, at 2.15.

For updates see the Physics Department seminar lists

Abstracts are posted weekly.

18 Feb Fillipo Vernizzi (CEA Saclay), “Cosmological consistency relations’

25 FebEmir Gumrukcouglu (Imperial College): ‘Horava gravity: suppressing Lorentz violations in the matter sector’

3 Mar Donnacha Kirk (UCL) ‘Cosmology from cross-correlations using the Dark Energy Survey’

10 Mar Michael Brown (Manchester), ‘Radio weak lensing with the Square Kilometre Array’

20 AprAnna Mangilli (IAS) ‘Constraints on the reionization era and inflation with the CMB polarization at large angular scales’

Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars HT 2016

Convened by Harvey Brown and Simon Saunders

The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8 in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.

Note that the seminar on Thu 28th is a joint seminar with the Jowett Society, and takes place at the changed time and place of 5.30 p.m., T. S. Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College.

Abstracts are posted weekly.

Thu 21st Jan (week 1): Philipp Roser (Clemson, Physics)
‘Time and York time in quantum theory’.

Thu 28th Jan (week 2): Saul Kripke (CUNY, Philosohy)
‘Wittgenstein, Russell, and our Concept of the Natural Numbers’

Thu 4th Feb (week 3): NO SEMINAR

Thu 11th Feb (Week 4): David Wallace (Oxford, Philosophy)
‘Who’s afraid of coordinate systems?’

Thu 18th Feb (week 5): Jean-Pierre Llored (Clermont, Philosophy)
‘From quantum physics to quantum chemistry’

Thu 25th Feb (Week 6): Stephen Blundell (Oxford, Physics)
‘Emergence, causation and storytelling: condensed matter physics and the limitations of the human mind’

Thu 3rd Mar (week 7): NO SEMINAR

Thu 10th Mar (week 8) Daniel Sudarsky (UNA, Mexico, Physics)
“The information loss during black hole a evaporation: A novel approach to diffusing the “paradox””

Cosmology seminars MT 2015

All seminars are in the BIPAC room, Denys Wilkinson Building, at 2.15, except in week 5 (Fri 13th), which is at 1.00 in the Fisher Room.

For updates see the Physics Department seminar lists

Abstracts are posted weekly.

08/10: Giulio Fabbian (SISSA)
15/10: Jens Chluba (Cambridge)
29/10: Mark Lovell (UVA)
05/11: Stefano Camera (Manchester)
13/11: Shaun Hotchkiss (Sussex) Note: this seminar is at 1.00 p.m. in the Fisher Room
19/11: Garrett Goon (DAMTP)
26/11: Zac Kenton (QMUL)
03/12: Simone Aiola (Pitt)

Philosophy of Physics Research Seminars MT 2015

Convened by Christopher Timpson

The following seminars will take place at 4.30 p.m. on Thursdays, weeks 1-8 in the Lecture Room of Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG.

Abstracts are posted weekly.

Thu 15th October (week 1): Oscar Dahlsten (Oxford, Physics)
The role of information in work extraction

Thu 22nd October (week 2): Bryan Roberts (LSE, Philosophy)
On the future of the weakly interacting arrow of time

Thu 29th October (week 3)Chiara Marletto (Oxford, Materials)
Constructor theory of information (and its implications for our understanding of quantum theory)

Thu 5th November (week 4)Joseph Milia (Oxford, Philosophy)
Haecceitism, Identity and Indiscernibility: (Mis-)Uses of Modality in the Philosophy of Physics

Thu 12th November (week 5) Karim Thebault (Bristol)
Regarding the ‘Hole Argument’ and ‘The Problem of Time’

Thu 19th November (week 6)Dan Bedingham (Oxford, Philosophy)
Dynamical collapse of the wavefunction and relativity

Thu 26th November (week 7)Ellen Clarke (Oxford, Philosophy)
Biological Ontology

Thu 3rd December (week 8)Thomas Moller-Nielsen (Oxford, Philosophy)
Symmetry and the Interpretation of Physical Theories

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, 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)
TBA

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): Harvey Brown and Christopher Timpson (Oxford)
Bell on Bell’s theorem: the changing face of nonlocality

Thu 26th Feb (week 6): James Ladyman (Bristol)
TBA

Thu 5th Mar (week 7): Nicholas Teh (Cambridge)
TBA

12th Mar (week 8): TBA

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

Workshop website >

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

Previous seminars >