• On Wednesday February 24th, Richard Dawid will speak at UIC on String Dualities and Empirical Equivalence.

• Next week, Wednesday March 2nd, we have our first double header:

(1) Eddy Keming Chen (Rutgers): Our Fundamental Physical Space and the Quantum Wave Function

(2) Alastair Wilson (Birmingham): Emergent Spacetime: Grounded or Caused?

More details on the Speakers page that you can access above. We expect to livestream both events on YouTube.

We are very happy to announce that Alyssa Ney (UC Davis) will be on the faculty of our summer school. Get those applications in!

Go to our YouTube channel for the latest videos.

We are pleased to announce our latest project activity – a 2016 summer school on the foundations of quantum gravity, near Chicago. Faculty include Gordon Belot, Jenann Ismael, Amanda Peet, and Carlo Rovelli. Please see more details under the project tab above.

This Thursday, Jan 14th, Sebastian de Haro (Cambridge and Amsterdam) gives a talk in Geneva: Emergence in Gauge/Gravity Dualities

Join us there, or at UIC or YouTube for a livestream – details on the speaker page above.

Deriving General Relativity from String Theory, by Tiziana Vistarini and me has just appeared in Philosophy of Science (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683448?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents – and also on the arXiv and philsci archives).

In response to some requests, we are extending the deadline for submission of essays for our essay contest until Friday December 11th, 2015. For details about the contest, please follow the links above.

The two most recent talks are now available on our YouTube channel.

Please join us for a talk, Wednesday November 11th. Join us at UIC or video conference at Geneva (details under ‘Speakers’ above), or via YouTube livestream (also above – click on ‘all activities’ once you get to our channel): 9.15am Chicago time.

• Wednesday November 11th 2015 at UIC — Kerry McKenzie (UC San Diego): Against Brute Fundamentalism

Abstract: “The claim that the fundamental is ‘brute and inexplicable’ is recited almost reflexively in philosophy.  But this ‘brutalist’ stance toward the fundamental seems to lie in increasing tension with what physicists claim to aspire to.  In this talk, I argue that those aspirations of physicists are not only reasonable, but that there is a sense in which they are already realized. In so doing, I hope to show that the idea that everything can be explained need not be tainted with rationalist overtones, but also to underline how qualified any claim of this nature must ultimately be.” In terms of technical difficulty, this talk ranks 3/5

Don’t forget that our essay prize deadline is November 30th — the winners receive $1000, and a place in the anthologies we are editing. Details at https://beyondspacetime.net/space-and-time-after-quantum-gravity/cfp-essay-prize-2015/.