Dear all, The first meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place next Wednesday, 16th October, between 5.30 - 7.00pm in the Philosophy Faculty board room.
Our first speaker is Karen Crowther on "Effective Spacetime" (abstract below). The termcard for Michaelmas 2013 is on the SMG website at http://www2.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/metaphysics.html Whilst there are no more spaces in Michaelmas, if you're interested in speaking in Lent or Easter term please get in touch, as the spaces are filling up quickly! I look forward to seeing many of you on the 16th. Best wishes, Matthew Simpson Karen Crowther - Effective Spacetime. Analogue models of gravity are useful for replicating general-relativistic phenomena “on the lab bench” (most recently, the gravitational lensing of light around stars has been re-created on a microchip! http://www.nature.com/news/curved-space-time-on-a-chip-1.13840 ). Some of these models (though not the chip) also present us with concrete examples of emergent spacetime, which is of interest in the quest for a quantum theory of gravity – they demonstrate how a curved spacetime might “emerge’’ from some more fundamental structures “beyond’’. In these cases, spacetime is described by an effective theory: a theory that is supposed to be valid only at a given energy (or length) scale. I explore the conception of emergence that is applicable to condensed matter analogues of general relativity (which also relates to emergence in the framework of effective field theory more generally) arguing that it is best understood without appeal to the idea of reduction or the usual philosophical categories of ontological- and epistemological-emergence. I finish by briefly mentioning some potential implications for quantum gravity. -- Matthew Simpson PhD Student in Philosophy University of Cambridge Mail: Robinson College, Cambridge, CB3 9AN _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
