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
UK: Joe Silk, Simon Saunders, Khalil Chamcham (Oxford), John Barrow (Cambridge)
US: Barry Loewer (Rutgers), David Albert (Columbia)
An international team of astronomers has uncovered the most ancient habitable exoplanet found to date. The discovery is all the more interesting because the planet originated outside of our Milky Way galaxy. At around 11.5 billion years old, the super-Earth is more than twice as old as our own planet and shows that habitable worlds were around much earlier in the universe’s history than previously thought. What is more, at 11 light years from Earth, it is a near neighbour.
Read more from Physics World June 5 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 1 May (week 1): Oliver Pooley (Oxford):
New work on the problem of time
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’ 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
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.
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
Published 18 June 2007
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.
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).
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.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss absolute zero, the lowest conceivable temperature. In the early eighteenth century the French physicist Guillaume Amontons suggested that temperature had a lower limit. The subject of low temperature became a fertile field of research in the nineteenth century, and today we know that this limit – known as absolute zero – is approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. It is impossible to produce a temperature exactly equal to absolute zero, but today scientists have come to within a billionth of a degree. At such low temperatures physicists have discovered a number of strange new phenomena including superfluids, liquids capable of climbing a vertical surface.
With:
Simon Schaffer
Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge
Stephen Blundell
Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
Nicola Wilkin
Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham
Producer: Thomas Morris
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r113g