We are delighted to announce two talks next Thursday, May 25:

First, at Université de Lausanne — Sam Baron (Australian Catholic University): Causation and quantum gravity. This talk is part of ‘Quo Vadis Time?’, the Geneva-Lausanne Workshop on Time in Physics and Philosophy, taking place 24-25 May 2023 in Lausanne. For more information, please visit the website.

Second, at Oxford University — Fedele Lizzi (Naples): Quantum Observers for Quantum Spacetime. This talk is part of the Thursday Philosophy of Physics Seminar. For more information and link to live stream, https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/event/philosophy-of-physics-seminar-thursday-week-5-tt23.

Due to a communication breakdown, you would have to put yourself into superposition to see both live; but both will be recorded for later watching. Hope to see you at one or the other!

We are excited to announce a paid predoctoral fellowship at UIC under our Templeton Grant, for Fall 2023. Full details are here: beyondspacetime.net/junior-fellowship-in-philosophy-of-quantum-gravity/. Please apply to spend time with us, or pass along to anyone who may be interested.

We just posted a couple of new videos, by Eugene Chua, and Mike Schneider talking a little about their work while part of Beyond Spacetime at UIC. Follow the links, or see our YouTube channel. Enjoy!

Our friends at QISS are advertising a summer school that will be of interest to some of you!

https://qiss.school

Recordings of the lectures given at our recent summer school are now available on our YouTube channel: linked above and here. Enjoy!

Congratulations to Mike Schneider, the current UIC postdoc, who will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri in January!

Thanks to everyone involved in the Morzine Summer Institute – it was a great success. The program and abstracts (and photos) are linked above (and here https://beyondspacetime.net/2022-summer-institute/), and videos will be posted soon.

The recent talks by Flaminia Giacomini and Anna Ijjas have been posted. See the speakers page, or our YouTube channel.

Please note that Anna Ijjas’ talk on Wednesday will now be zoom only. Details below, and on the speakers page. Please join us virtually!

Please join us in person at UIC, remotely at UNIGE, or online via zoom or YouTube on Wednesday, 6 April (11:15 Chicago time) for a talk by Anna Ijjas (NYU).

Entropy, Black Holes, and the Early Universe. “Emerging from a big bang in which gravity is strongly coupled and quantum fluctuations of stress-energy and spacetime are both large, the natural expectation is that the total entropy should be nearly maximal and equally distributed among both stress-energy and gravitational degrees of freedom. However, the observed entropy distribution on the last scattering surface is puzzlingly different, as Penrose has emphasized. In this talk, I will introduce the cosmological entropy problem and discuss our recent proposal to evade it.”

More information on our Speakers page.