This term sees the start of the FraMEPhys visiting speaker series, and our first speaker was Dr Emily Adlam (BRCP, Leipzig) who spoke on Monday 11th Feb.

Emily’s title was ‘A Tale of Two Anachronisms’, and her abstract was:

“Scientific reasoning is constrained not only by the outcomes of experiments, but also by the history of human thought and our own place in it. As a result, even our best theoretical models often incorporate features which are present more as the result of historical accident than as the endpoint of a process of evidence-based deliberation, and it is sometimes possible to make considerable progress by identifying and eliminating such features. In this talk, I will identify two features of current thought about quantum physics which may be anachronisms of this kind. I will briefly discuss their history and then raise some arguments against them. Both of these features have previously been recognized as problematic by parts of the physics community, but I argue that this recognition is not sufficiently widespread and that both features are actively limiting progress in the field of quantum foundations.”

The remaining dates in the series are:

25 Feb: Antonio Vassallo (Barcelona)
11 Mar: Laura Felline (Roma Tre)
6 May: Matt Farr (Cambridge)
20 May: Patricia Palacios (Salzburg)
3 June: Mark Pexton (Durham)

— Alastair Wilson