[PhilPhys] Sigma Club at LSE - Lent Term Programme

[R.P.Frigg at lse.ac.uk]

Sigma Club at LSE - Lent Term Programme


Place: Room T206, all welcome. 

For maps and directions visit
http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/mapsAndDirections/

For Further information about the Sigma Club and its events visit: 
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CPNSS/projects/SigmaClub/Default.htm




Monday 21 January, 5:00-7:00 pm
Reimer Kuehn <http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/staff/r_kuehn.html> 
King's Collge London
On the constitutive role of large numbers in theory development for
macroscopic systems
This talk is about the central role that large numbers have played in
the process of developing theories about macroscopic systems. I begin by
analysing the empirical foundation of this observation, the emergence of
stability and regularity through averaging in large systems, and
describe its formalisation via limit theorems of mathematical
statistics. I choose a language which emphasises properties of
descriptions on scales which are much larger than the atomic or
molecular scale at which, according to current understanding, the
phenomena being described have their origin. By going on to consider the
consequences that the empirical foundation of our observation has for
our neural information processing apparatus, we are forced to conclude
that large numbers play a crucial role already in allowing stable
perception and representation of external and internal reality, and thus
appear to be constitutive for all theorising about the world.
 
Monday 4 February, 5:00-7:00 pm
Fred Muller <http://www.phys.uu.nl/igg/muller/> 
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Leibniz's Revenge: How to Discern Elementary Particles in Quantum
Mechanics
 
Monday 18 February, 5:00-7:00 pm
Charlotte Werndl <http://charlottewerndl.net/> 
University of Cambridge
What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability? 
From the beginning of chaos research until today, the unpredictability
of chaos has been a central theme. It is widely believed and claimed by
philosophers, mathematicians and physicists alike that chaos has a new
implication for unpredictability, meaning that chaotic systems are
unpredictable in a way other deterministic systems are not. Hence one
might expect that the question "What are the new implication of chaos
for unpredictability?" has already been answered in a satisfactory way.
However, this is not the case. I will critically evaluate the existing
answers and argue that they do not fit the bill. Then I will approach
this question by showing that chaos can be defined via mixing, which has
never been explicitly argued for. Based on this insight, I will propose
that the sought-after new implication of chaos for unpredictability is
that for predicting any event all sufficiently past events are
approximately probabilistically irrelevant.
 
 
Monday 3 March, 5:00-7:00 pm
Lennie Smith <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/cats/Lennypage.htm> ,
University of Oxford and LSE
TBA
 


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