Local events

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 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 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

Previous seminars >

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

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 >

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 →