News

On Friday, 12 March, Daniele Oriti (LMU Munich) will give a talk entitled “Which spacetime emergence in quantum gravity?” (abstract below). The meeting will take place online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl. The recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel. Abstract: We discuss several issues in quantum gravity, related to the notion of spacetime being emergent and not fundamental, focusing on their conceptual aspects more than their (possible) technical solution: – what it…continue reading →

On Friday, 26 February, Sean Carroll (Caltech) will give a talk entitled “From Quantum Mechanics to Spacetime” (abstract below). The meeting will take place online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl. The recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel. Abstract: Nine decades in, the foundations of quantum mechanics remain mysterious. Meanwhile, modern physicists puzzle over how to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. I will suggest that these problems are related, and that a promising…continue reading →

The Philosophy of Physics Group is happy to announce the program of the Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium for the upcoming term: 26 February (17:00-19:00 CET) - Sean Carroll (Caltech) - "From Quantum Mechanics to Spacetime" 12 March (17:00-19:00 CET) - Daniele Oriti (LMU Munich) - TBA 26 March (17:00-19:00 CET) - Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) - "Superdeterminism" 09 April (17:00-19:00 CEST) - Erik Curiel (LMU Munich, Harvard University) - "The Dynamics of Classical Physics Determines the Structure of Newtonian Spacetime; That of Quantum Physics Does Not" 23 April (17:00-19:00 CEST) -…continue reading →

On Friday, 22 January, Vera Matarese (University of Bern) will give a talk entitled “Spacetime the many substances” (abstract below). The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl. The recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel. Abstract: The view that loop quantum gravity’s spin-networks represent concrete atoms of space is proposed in Vassallo & Esfeld (2014), which adopts a primitive ontology approach to spacetime. Rovelli (2015), on the contrary, warns…continue reading →

On Friday, 8 January, Karim Thébault (University of Bristol) will give a talk entitled “Poincaré, dark energy, and the deadly robots of Krikkit: Solving the problem of time via superpositions of the cosmological constant” (abstract below). The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl. The program for the winter semester can be found here, while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel. Abstract: Henri Poincaré, in a strangely neglected…continue reading →

On Friday, 30 October, James Read (University of Oxford) will give a talk entitled “Shifts and reference” (abstract below). The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl. The program for the winter semester can be found here, while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO's YouTube channel. Abstract: Maudlin’s ‘metric essentialist’ response to the hole argument of general relativity is well-known, but differs strikingly from his response to what is often…continue reading →