[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Karim Thébault (8 January on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

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 at pw.edu.pl.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3168> at the International Center
for Formal Ontology (Warsaw University of Technology). The program for the
winter semester can be found here
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3389>.

The recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO's YouTube
channel
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-1yNCyvJJAfiq7LDFjfYc1I5OOxhJ1A>.

ABSTRACT
Henri Poincaré, in a strangely neglected passage towards the end of his
monumental essay on `Relative and Absolute Motion’ (Science and Hypothesis,
1905 Chapter 7), appeals to the idea of a planet entirely secluded from the
rest of the universe by clouds to argue that ‘as long as nature has
secrets’ the distinction between constants of nature and constants of
motion will remain ‘highly arbitrary and always precarious’ (p.87). To what
extent do such arguments support a relationship between a scientist’s
epistemic access to different scales and the categorisation of constants?
What are the implications of this view for modern cosmology, in particular
the interpretation of the cosmological constant, the nature of time, and
the quantization of gravity? And what does any of this have to do with
Robots? In this talk I will attempt to answer these and other related
questions. (Based on work with Sean Gryb (University of Groningen).)
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