We are very happy to announce that our first hire to the Space and Time After Quantum Gravity project is Keizo Matsubara, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rotman Institute of Western University: http://www.rotman.uwo.ca/members/keizo-matsubara/. He will be joining the philosophy department at UIC as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in September. Welcome on board!

To make video of the conference more generally available, all sessions have been posted to a YouTube channel: ‘beyondspacetime’. The URL is https://www.youtube.com/c/BeyondspacetimeNet.

Sorry for the very long delay, due in large part to UIC’s lawyers failing to agree to terms with apple for proper affiliation with iTunes U, but you can now see video of the conference.

Title: Seminar on the Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Gravity

Register here: https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/enroll/FP4-AXP-VN4

The bad news is that for now you can only view it on an iOS device with iTunes U installed. I truly apologize for this, but until UIC signs up, apple doesn’t allow proper public access (well, it’s the public access that UIC is worried about). But I didn’t want to hold back anyone who is able to access the material. (The bit you really need is the enrollment code in the URL: FP4-AXP-VN4)

I know we could just put it up on YouTube, but I keep putting off moving things there because iTunes U is very nice when it works.

Nick
11/12/14

We want to apologize that videos of the talks are not yet available. The video is ready to post, but we are still waiting on UIC to sign a contract with apple to create a space on iTunesU. If we have to wait much longer we will find another way to post the footage.

Below you will find blogs written live during talks. Please feel free to discuss them using  the comments – it is open to people who didn’t attend as well as participants. There are also slides for most talks, available above.

Some pictures from the meeting are also available above.

Fourth section: personal reflections

(1) Beware of beguiling words: one has to be careful not to be led down the garden path by nefarious doctrines such as Kantianism. So conceptual analysis has its limited place–but have it checked against empirically established results!

(2) The vacuum vs. zilch (cf Oliver and Smiley, Analysis): ‘zilch’ as a necessarily non-referring term, and its usefulness in philosophical discourse, and to avoid mystery mongering about the vacuum in QFT and LQG.

(3) Condensed matter approaches: challenges whether we have any grip on what the fundamental degrees of freedom are. Should we take it to be suspicious that some theories have remnants of less fundamental theories in them, such as the Ashtekar variables in LQG?

(4) Duality: Butterfield starts out from Belot’s appraisal that philosophers and physicists have different attitudes towards dual theories, where the former see two theories (because they reject verificationism) and the latter deny that (because they are moved by historical examples of dual pairs of theories who would then dissolve into a more general unified theories which was recognized as progress).

Third section: What use philosophy?

What could be philosophy’s role, apart from scavenging on the carcasses of dead theories, be journalists or camp follower, or perhaps more in symbiosis (like pilot fish guiding the sharks…).

Examples of foundational work which can act as heuristics for future fundamental physics, such as Belot’s study of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, or Weatherall’s investigation of the relationship between Newtonian gravity and GR.

What are projects for the young? Previous examples of low-hanging fruit: Bell’s locality condition arises in Reichenbach’s philosophy, Manchak’s bringing to fruition of earlier considerations of work by Malament and Glymour.