Academic Year 2021-2022
Winter 2022
4/1/22: N. Emery 2021 draft, “The Governing Conception of Laws”
3/11/22: H. Demarest 2017, “Powerful Properties, Powerless Laws”
2/18/22: A. Solé and C. Hoefer 2019, “The Nomological Status of the Wave Function”
2/4/22: J. Milton 1980, “The Origin and Development of the Concept of the ‘Laws of Nature’”
1/21/22: J. Carroll 2020, “Laws of Nature”
Fall 2021 (meetings were every other Friday form 1-2pm, online)
12/3/21: D. Wallace (2021 version) “Observability, redundancy and modality”
11/19/21: T. Moller-Nielsen, “Invariance, Interpretation, and Motivation“
11/5/21: E. Castellani and R. Dardashti 2022, “Symmetry Breaking”
10/22/21: N. Teh 2022, “Gauge Theories” and D. Wallace 2003, “Time-dependent Symmetries”
10/8/21: S. Dasgupta 2022, “Symmetries and Superfluous Structure”
9/24/21: D. Papineau 2021draft, “The Causal Structure of Reality”
9/10/21: M. Frisch 2021, “Causal Explanation in Physics”
Academic Year 2018-2019
Winter 2019
April 23 2019: K. McKenzie 2017, “Relativities of fundamentality”
J. Polchinksi 2017, “Dualities of fields and strings”
March 12: D. Wallace 2019, “Naturalness and Emergence”
February 19: J. Butterfield 2018, book review of S. Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
S. Hossenfelder 2018, response on blog
February 5: Ma, Kofler, and Zeilinger 2016, “Delayed-choice Gedanken experiments and their realizations.”
January 22: M. Lange 2014, “Depth and Explanation in Mathematics.”
December 5, 2018: M. Weisberg 2017, “New approaches to the division of cognitive labor”
Optional: M. Strevens 2003, “The role of the priority rule in science“
November 7: J. Wells 2018, “Finetuned Cancellations and Improbable Theories.”
October 24: A. Linde 2006, “Sinks in the landscape, Boltzmann brains, and the cosmological constant problem.”
October 17: B. Loewer draft, “The Mantaculus Vision” and D. Albert 2012, “Physics and Chance”
October 10: C. Fuchs and R. Schack’s 2004, “Unknown quantum states and operations, a Bayesian view”
September 26: J. Earman 2018, “Believing the unbelievable”
September 19, 2018: C. Glymour 1981, “Why I am not a Bayesian.”
Academic Year 2017-2018
5/15/18
Grad student panel: (Josh Hunt and AJ Kuhr)
4/9/18
Grad student panel (in conjunction with Science, Values, and the Public reading group)
2/16/18
A. Borrelli 2012: “The Case of the Composite Higgs”
2/2/18
T. Cao 2016: “The Englert-Brout-Higgs mechanism — An unfinished project”
1/19/18
C. Quigg 2016: “Future colliders: Scientific overview”
C. Quigg 2015: “Particle physics after the Higgs-boson discovery”
11/30/17
N. Dewar 2017: “Interpretation and equivalence”
11/9/17
D. Wallace 2017: “Why black hole information loss is paradoxical”
10/26/17
T. Maudlin 2017: “(Information) paradox lost”
10/12/17
J. Dougherty and C. Callendar 2016: “Black hole thermodynamics: more than an analogy?”
9/28/17
P. Williams 2015: “Naturalness, the autonomy of scales, and the 125 GeV Higgs”
9/14/17
K. Crowther and N. Linnemann 2017: “Renormalizability, fundamentality, and a final theory: the role of UV-completion in the search for quantum gravity”
Academic Year 2016-2017
5/11/17
T. Menon (ms): Taking up superspace
5/4/17
P. Schwarz and J. Schwarz (2004): Supersymmetry and superspace (Ch 9)
4/26/17
J. Holloway presents “Continuum-Many Interacting Worlds”
3/10/17
J.T. Ismael (2016): How physics makes us free (selections)
Special guest: Prof. David Garfinkle (Oakland U.)
2/17/17
J. Hartle and M. Srednicki (2007): Are we typical?
2/10/17
S. Weinberg (1987): Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant
S. Weinberg (2005): Living in the multiverse
2/3/17
No meeting! Go to this talk instead!
1/20/17
Y. Benétreau-Dupin: Blurring out Cosmic Puzzles (2015)
12/7/16
L. Susskind: Lattice Fermions (1977)
H. Nielson & M. Ninomiya: A No-Go Theorem for Regularizing Chiral Fermions (1981)
11/30/16
K. Wilson: Confinement of Quarks (1974)
11/16/16
J. Weatherall: Are Newtonian Gravitation and Geometrized Newtonian Gravitation Theoretically Equivalent?
11/9/16
K. Coffey: On Mass and Energy in Special Relativistic Particle Dynamics
(e-mail for a copy)
10/26/16
J. Norton: A Quantum Mechanical Supertask
Stanford Encyclopedia blurb: QM Supertasks
10/12/16
R. Batterman: Philosophical implications of Kadanoff’s work on the renormalization group
10/05/16
J. Baez: Struggles with the continuum, Sections 4-5
9/28/16
J. Baez: Struggles with the continuum, Sections 1-3
9/21/16
J. Dunkel and S. Hilbert: Consistent Thermostatistics forbids negative absolute temperatures
D. Frenkel and P. Warren: Gibbs, Boltzmann, and negative temperatures
Optional: Schneider et al. comment on Dunkel and Hilbert paper
Optional: Dunkel and Hilbert rebuttal
Academic Year 2015-2016
3/22/16
Robert Weingard: Do virtual particles exist?
3/15/16
Jürgen Struckmeier: General relativity as an extended canonical gauge theory
2/16/16
Joseph Polchinski: String theory to the rescue and Why trust a theory?
2/2/16
G. Romero and D. Pérez: Presentism meets black holes
1/19/16
Lydia Patton: Methodological realism and modal resourcefulness
12/4/15
Simon Saunders: Are quantum particles objects?
11/13/15
H. Greaves and W. Myrvold: Everett and evidence
10/30/15
Nick Huggett: Target space [does not equal] space
10/23/15
F. Arntzenius and H. Greaves: Time reversal in classical electromagnetism
10/9/15
Workshop planning
10/2/15
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully: Black holes: complementarity or firewalls?
A. Almheiri et al.: An apologia for firewalls
Leonard Susskind: Singularities, firewalls, and complementarity
9/25/15
Hilary Greaves: Probability in the Everett interpretation
9/18/15
Organizational meeting
Academic Year 2014-2015
12/8/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 102-116)11/24/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 86-101)
11/17/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 73-86)
11/10/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 46-72)
11/3/14
Aephraim Steinberg, Amir Feizpour, Lee Rozema, Dylan Mahler, and Alex Hayat, In Praise of Weakness
Yakir Aharonov, David Z. Albert, and Lev Vaidman, How the Result of a Measurement of a Component of the Spin of a Spin-1/2 Particle Can Turn Out to be 100
Boaz Tamir and Eliahu Cohen, Introduction to Weak Measurements and Weak Values
10/27/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 24-45)
10/20/14
David Wallace, Deflating the Aharonov-Bohm Effect
10/6/14
R. I. G. Hughes, The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (chapters 2, 3, & 5)
9/22/14
Chris Smeenk, Philosophy of Cosmology
9/22/14
Laura Ruetsche, Interpreting Quantum Theories (pg. 1-24)
9/15/14
David Wallace, Probability in Physics: Statistical, Stochastic, and Quantum
Academic Year 2013-2014
4/24/14
Organizational meeting
4/10/14
Francois Englert, Broken Symmetry and Yang-Mills Theory3/27/14
Frank Arntzenius, Space, Time, & Stuff, Chapter 3: The world according to quantum mechanics
3/13/14
Craig Callender, Taking Thermodynamics Too Seriously
2/20/14
Max Tegmark, Consciousness as a State of Matter
2/6/14
Susan Schneider, What is the Significance of the Intuition that Laws of Nature Govern?
1/16/14
Abhay Ashtekar, Luca Bombelli, and Oscar Reula, The Covariant Phase Space of Asymptotically Flat Gravitational Fields
12/16/13
Imre Lakatos, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes12/2/13
Jonathan Cohen and Craig Callender, A Better Best System Account of Lawhood
11/18/13
Francesco Buscemi, All Entangled Quantum States are Nonlocal
11/4/13
Jeffrey Barett, Empirical Adequacy and the Availability of Reliable Records in Quantum Mechanics
10/21/13
Sheldon Goldstein, Stochastic Mechanics and Quantum Theory
Guido Bacciagaluppi, A Conceptual Introduction to Nelson’s Mechanics
9/30/13
Jonathan Bain, Emergence in Effective Field Theories
9/23/13
Presentation: Gabriele Carcassi, Determinism and Reversibility: how they coincide with Hamiltonian mechanics and why they are needed
9/16/13
Tim Maudlin, On the Unification of Physics
Academic Year 2012-2013
4/15/13
Doreen Fraser, In Support of the Coalesced Structures Argument: Classical Statistical Mechanics and Constructive QFT4/8/13
Adam Helfer, Do Black Holes Radiate? (pg. 1-10 & 56-66)
Joe Polchinski, Guest Post: Joe Polchinski on Black Holes, Complementarity, and Firewalls
Gerard ‘t Hooft, The Scattering Matrix Approach for the Quantum Black Hole (sections 1, 6, & 11) [OPTIONAL]
4/1/13
David Wallace, Time-dependent Symmetries: the link between gauge symmetries and indeterminism
John Norton, General Covariance, Gauge Theories, and the Kretschmann Objection (OPTIONAL)
Michael Redhead, The Interpretation of Gauge Symmetry (OPTIONAL)
3/25/13
Alexei Grinbaum, Which Fine-Tuning Arguments Are Fine?
Gian Giudice, Naturally Speaking: The Naturalness Criterion and Physics at the LHC
3/11/13
David Baker, Can We Make Do Without Observables? Evaluating Spacetime State Realism
David Wallace and Christopher Timpson, Quantum Mechanics on Spacetime I: Spacetime State Realism (OPTIONAL)
2/25/13
Eleanor Knox, Newton-Cartan Theory and Teleparallel Gravity: The Force of a Formulation
2/11/13
David Wallace, Taking Particle Physics Seriously
Doreen Fraser, Quantum .Field theory: Underdetermination, Inconsistency, and Idealization
1/28/13
David Mermin, Quantum Mechanics: Fixing the Shifty Split
David Mermin, What’s Bad About This Habit?
Christopher Fuchs, QBism, the Perimeter of Quantum Bayesianism (ONLY pages 1-14)
1/23/13
David Albert, Physics and Narrative
Simon Judes, Narratability and Cluster Decomposition (OPTIONAL)
12/14/12
David Wallace and Hilary Greaves, Empirical Consequences of Symmetries
11/30/12
Allori, Goldstein, Tumulka, and Zanghi, Predictions and Primitive Ontology in Quantum Foundations: A Study of Examples
11/16/12
Scott Aaronson, Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
11/2/12
Hilary Greaves, Probability in the Everett Interpretation
10/19/12
Nick Huggett and Christian Wuthrich, Is Science Without Spacetime Possible?
10/5/12
Erik Verlinde, On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton
9/21/12
Laura Ruetsche, Philosophical Aspects of Quantum Field Theory: I
Laura Ruetsche, Philosophical Aspects of Quantum Field Theory: II
Contact
Email Francisco Calderón (fcalder@umich.edu) to join our mailing list, fomp.fomp@umich.edu.
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