See below for two upcoming Philosophy of Physics events hosted at King’s as part of the Bristol-London-Oxford Cambridge (BLOC) network. Please do sign up and come along! 

Lucy James – Cosmic Censorship in Quarantine

Thursday 7th December 2023, 4:30-6:30pm, King’s College London Strand Campus, Strand Building S-1.04

Sign-up link: https://philevents.org/event/show/116597

Abstract: An entailment of strong cosmic censorship is that models of spacetime are to be globally hyperbolic. This talk challenges the motivation for imposing such a constraint in a ‘top-down’ manner. From a functionalist point of view, it is argued, our understanding of the global structure of spacetime at cosmological scales ought to arise from careful generalisations of dynamical laws that apply locally. A link is shown between partial differential equations of the hyperbolic type (the form of many dynamical laws) and hyperbolic manifolds, providing some reason to regard spacetime as being hyperbolic at cosmological scales. However, if the analysis includes approaches to quantum gravity whose laws may not be of the hyperbolic form, such as Euclidean approaches, this link breaks down. Strong cosmic censorship, therefore, is relevant only to a restricted set of regimes.

If you’d like to attend dinner, please email alexander.r.franklin@kcl.ac.uk

Graduate Philosophy of Physics Workshop

Thursday 14th December 2023, King’s College London Strand Campus, Bush House (SE) 1.06

Sign-up link: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScjKGCotVZ8Xuh_iCk_YyyvMGZD4RU4BCG5uN59dBGNSdpInw/viewform?pli=1

Program (all talks will take place in person):
10.30-11.00 – Arrivals and Welcome
11.00-11.50 – Noemi Bolzonetti (University of Italian Switzerland) – Pattern Wave Function Priority Monism
11.50-12.40 – Jonathan Fay (University of Bristol) – On the Relativity of Magnitudes: Delboeuf’s forgotten contribution to the 19th Century problem of space
12.40-14.00 – Lunch
14.00-14.50 – Paolo Faglia (University of Oxford) – Relational Quantum Mechanics: what is an interaction?
14.50-15.40 – Marta Pedroni (University of Geneva) – The singular case of spacetime singularities in quantum gravity
15.40-16.00 – Break
16.00-16.50 – Nicola Bamonti (Scuola Normale Superiore) – What is reference frame in General Relativity?
16.50-17.40 – Anton Sverdlikov (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) – Event Structural Realism
After – Drinks and Dinner

If you choose to attend online we will send a link a few days before. Looking forward to seeing people there! Any questions please contact bblocgradworkshop@gmail.com.