Followers of FraMEPhys might be interested in the following talks at the University of Oxford during May and June 2019:

Thursday May 2: Olivier Darrigol (Paris)
Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 4.30 p.m.

Ludwig Boltzmann: Atoms, mechanics, and probability
Statistical mechanics owes much more to Ludwig Boltzmann than is usually believed. In his attempts to derived thermodynamic and transport phenomena from deeper microphysical assumptions, he explored at least five different approaches: One based on mechanical analogies (with periodic mechanical systems or with statistical ensembles), one based on Maxwell’s collision formula, one based on the ergodic hypothesis, one based on combinatorial probabilities, and one based on the existence of thermodynamic equilibrium. I will sketch this various approaches and show how Boltzmann judged them and interconnected them. It will also argue that in general Boltzmann was more concerned with constructive efficiency than with precise conceptual foundations. Basic questions on the reality of atoms or on the nature of probabilities played only a secondary role in his theoretical enterprise.

Friday May 3: Nancy Cartwright (Durham and UC San Diego),
Jowett Society (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 3.30 p.m.

‘Nature the artful modeler’
Are our hugely effective scientific laws – like equations we use in physics for precise prediction and technology – true? No. But they are not false either. They are not proper propositions in competition for truth or falsehood. What we find in physics texts and articles are not well-formed formulae but equations and ‘principles’ without, e.g., quantifiers and ‘ceteris paribus’ conditions included. Nor, I shall argue, can they be turned into proper propositions and still do all the jobs we require of them. They are rather materials we have learned how to use to build models and claims that are not only candidates for truth but, in any common sense of the word, are true. We are artful modelers, and we have insufficient reason to think it could ever be different. I urge that, as good empiricists should, we take successful scientific practice as our guide to what the world is like. Our best bet then about Nature is that she is not in the business of following out some laws writ in heavenly books any more than we are. She too is an artful modeler. The talk will defend the claim that we recoup the facts by artful modelling and explain what it means to claim that that is what Nature does too.

Thursday May 16: Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge)
Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 4.30p.m.

On realism and functionalism about space and time
(Joint work with Henrique Gomes.) In this talk I will set the recent literature on spacetime functionalism in context, by discussing two traditions that form its background. First: functionalism in general, as a species of inter-theoretic reduction. Second: relationism about space and time.

Thursday May 30: Henrique Gomes (Perimeter and Cambridge)
Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 4.30p.m.

Gauge, boundaries, and the connection form
Forces such as electromagnetism and gravity reach across the Universe; they are the long-ranged forces in current physics. And yet, in many applications—theoretical and otherwise—we only have access to finite domains of the world. For instance, in computations of entanglement entropy, e.g. for black holes or cosmic horizons, we raise boundaries to separate the known from the unknown. In this talk, I will argue we do not understand gauge theory as well as we think we do, when boundaries are present. For example: It is agreed by all that we should aim to construct variables that have a one to one relationship to the theory’s physical content within bounded regions. But puzzles arise if we try to combine definitions of strictly physical variables in different parts of the world.

Thursday June 6: Martin Lesourd (Oxford)
Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 4.30p.m.

Reasoning on the basis of past lightcones
We shall ask the following: in general relativistic spacetimes, what can observers know about their spacetime on the basis of their past lightcones? After briefly describing the inductive character of this question, I will review and describe the significance of various known results, due in particular to Malament 1977 and Manchak 2009. I will then present some new ones and explain how they bear on the former. Time permitting, I shall briefly describe the idea behind general relativity’s foremost open problem – the conjecture of strong cosmic censorship – along with its potential relevance. 

Thursday June 13: Harvey Brown (Oxford)
Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities), 4.30p.m.

Title and abstract TBA.

Thursday June 20: John Bush (MIT),
Mathematical Institute (Woodstock Rd, OX26GG), 5.00 p.m.

Walking on water: from biolocomotion to quantum foundations
In this lecture John Bush will present seemingly disparate research topics which are in fact united by a common theme and underlaid by a common mathematical framework.  First there is the ingenuity of the natural world where living creatures use surface tension to support themselves on the water surface and propel themselves along it. Then there is a system discovered by Yves Couder only fifteen years ago, in which a small droplet bounces along the surface of a vibrating liquid bath, guided or ‘piloted’ by its own wave field. Its ability to reproduce many features previously thought to be exclusive to quantum systems has launched the field of hydrodynamic quantum analogs, and motivated a critical revisitation of the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics.

Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register.
This talk will be streamed live on:
https://facebook.com/OxfordMathematics
https://livestream.com/oxuni/bush