The philosophy of physics group at the Department of Philosophy at UIC solicits applications for a junior visiting fellowship for advanced PhD students, starting January 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter, for six months. Candidates must be ABD in a PhD program at an accredited university, working on a dissertation related to the philosophy of quantum gravity or cosmology, broadly construed.

If you are a current PhD student, please consider applying. If you aren’t, please pass this message on!

Full details here: https://beyondspacetime.net/junior-fellowship-in-philosophy-of-quantum-gravity/

We invite interested scholars for short visits to the Cosmology Beyond Spacetime research group located in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Spring 2022. To facilitate visits we can offer financial assistance for travel and lodging, office facilities, and of course excellent intellectual company. Visits can be from a few days to a few weeks (or possibly longer).

We hope to have range of visitors: faculty and graduate students; general philosophers, philosophers of physics, and physicists; those sharing their expertise, and those learning about the philosophy of quantum gravity and the work of our group and speakers. Visitors will help us inform the philosophical and physics communities about philosophical issues in quantum gravity; and they will help us learn more about these philosophical dimensions though our interactions. While visitors will be credentialed philosophers or physicists, in some cases a credible interest in professional engagement with the group will be more important than prior work in quantum gravity.

In the first instance, potential visitors are requested to send a brief (one page) letter of interest, explaining their current academic status, research focus, and interest in our project. Please also explain any special activities you would like to undertake with the group, date(s) you would like to visit, and estimated cost of a flight. We will request further information as needed, and discuss times and budgets (up to $500, with the possibility of more for longer visits, depending on demand) with successful applicants.

We especially encourage applications from women and underrepresented minorities.

Review of requests will be ongoing.

Send letters of interest to beyondspacetimeseminar@gmail.com. And please share the invitation.

Nick Huggett, UIC

Our second collection is published today in the UK (a few more weeks for the US)! Investigations of the philosophical implications of quantum gravity – many thanks to all our authors.

Available from OUP here. Get them while they’re hot!

With sadness we note the passing of Steven Weinberg. His influence on physics has of course been enormous, but – despite his public antipathy to ‘philosophy’ – his conceptual insights into quantum field theory and gravity (and more) have also greatly influenced many of us in philosophy of physics. Notably for me, his work on the renormalization group, the relation between fields and particle in QFT, and – especially relevant to this website – his contributions to our understanding of the scope and limits of gravity as a QFT. Beyond that of course are his amazing popular works in physics, that I expect helped bring many of us to physics in the first place.

Blog followers may be interested in the following interview of Tushar Menon by David Baker, on “Taking up Superspace”, a paper published in the project collection “Philosophy Beyond Spacetime” (OUP, 2021). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mj_3FZWMIM

We are delighted to announce that Mike Schneider (currently a postdoc at Pittsburgh) will be joining our group at UIC as a postdoctoral research fellow for 2021-22. If you don’t yet know Mike, you can read about his work on his website.

Please join us for a talk next week.

Wednesday, 14 April 2021 at 9:30am Chicago Time– Craig Callender (UCSD) and Eugene Chua (UCSD): No Time for Time from No-Time

Programs in quantum gravity often claim that time emerges from fundamentally timeless
physics. In the semiclassical time program time arises only after approximations are
taken. Here we ask what justifies taking these approximations and show that time seems
to sneak in when answering this question. This raises the worry that the approach is
either unjustified or circular in deriving time from no–time.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://uic.zoom.us/j/86317237897?pwd=dSt0N0JsRVVpbEx6Y0EyY1RwKzN4UT09

Meeting ID: 863 1723 7897

Passcode: RMvp1pYM

March 16 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm Eastern Time (note that US clocks went forward on March 14th, and adjust to your local time accordingly!!!)

Nick Huggett, University of Illinois at Chicago / Center Senior Visiting Fellow

Missing the Point in Non-Commutative Field Theory

This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required.  Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8cIVYSN0RfywEh4uJOp0MA

ABSTRACT:  A non-commutative field theory (for scalar fields in this talk) introduces a fundamental area, as the measure of non-commutation (analogous to Planck’s constant), but does it signify a minimum area? Drawing on work with Fedele Lizzi (Napoli) and Tushar Menon (Cambridge) I will explain a sense in which this is correct, implying that points are ‘missing’. This situation raises several questions: how should the theory then be understood? Can its algebraic formulation be interpreted as describing the basic degrees of freedom of a world? And if so, how do we understand the ‘emergence’ of continuous, classical spacetime physics?

Join us online on Wednesday March 10 at 10.15am (Eastern) for Fay Dowker (Imperial) for “If Time Had No Beginning”. Details and registration are here: https://www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/cosmology-beyond-spacetime/.

Abstract: Could the universe have had no beginning? I don’t mean, in raising thisquestion, to deny or throw doubt on Big Bang cosmology and the existence in the past of a hot, dense state of Planckian curvatureand temperature. But, in that case, how is the question to be interpreted given that—if we accept the standard cosmology— the Lorentzian manifold structure of spacetime breaks down at the Big Bang? Certainly,  the *continuum* concept of timein our cosmological epoch “begins” at the Big Bang. Can we even ask what happened “before” that?  The causal set approach to the problem of quantum gravity provides an arena in which to address the question of origins, in which it makes sense to ask what happened before the Big Bang and in which a clear distinction can be made between models of the universe which are “past infinite” and “past finite”. I will describe work with Stav Zalel and Bruno Bento in which we construct a framework for dynamics for causal sets which can result in past infinite universes. 

Nick Huggett will be speaking online at the Oxford Philosophy of Physics seminar on Thursday 4^th March, at 16.30 GMT. Details here: https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/philosophy-of-physics-seminar#. Hope to see you there.

Title: Missing the point in (noncommutative) field theory.

Abstract: A non-commutative field theory (for scalar fields in this talk) introduces a fundamental area, as the measure of non-commutation (analogous to Planck’s constant), but does it signify a minimum area? Drawing on work with Fedele Lizzi (Napoli) and Tushar Menon (Cambridge) I will explain a sense in which this is correct, implying that points are ‘missing’. This situation raises several questions: how should the theory then be understood? Can its algebraic formulation be interpreted as describing the basic degrees of freedom of a world? And if so, how do we understand the ‘emergence’ of continuous, classical spacetime physics?