Conferences
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
Cosmology and Quantum Foundations: Introduction (Joe Silk)
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.
Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy: Foundations of Physics
29-31 July 2013
“Foundations of Physics” will take place from 29 to 31 July, 2013. There will be an evening lecture by Julian Barbour together with a drinks reception in the “Ehrensaal” (main building) of Deutsches Museum (at Museumsinsel) on the first day of the conference.
Summer school in philosophy of cosmology, University of California at Santa Cruz
24 June – 12 JULY 2013
Organizers: David Albert (Columbia, NYU), Joel Primack (University of California Santa Cruz), and Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)