[PhilPhys] Sigma Club Meetings

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

Sima Club Meetings at LSE this Term:

Monday 1 June , 5:15-7:00 pm 
[This *replaces* the May 25 meeting previously announced] 

Antony Eagle, University of Oxford

Chance and Randomness

It is widespread and understandable assumption that randomness doesn't
exist without chance, and vice versa. But closer attention to the two
phenomena makes this assumption difficult to defend. I'll argue that it
is false, giving cases where the two come apart, and along the way
clarifying the vexed relationship each has to determinism.



Monday 15 June, 5:15-7:00 pm

Tian Yu Cao, Boston University

Title: Structural realism and theory-creation.

Abstract: The role played by the mathematical structure adopted by
Murray Gell-Mann in his current algebra, the Lie algebra with a special
representation, in the creation of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) will be
examined step by step. The examination will be used to advocate a
constructive version of structural realism.


Monday 29 June , 5:15-7:00 pm

Matt Parker, LSE

On the physical implementation of universal computers.
 
Standard digital computers are said to be computationally equivalent to
Universal Turing machines, but this is not strictly true without an
unlimited supply of storage space and energy.  In 1990, Cristopher Moore
suggested a radically different model of a computer that would be
spacially bounded and truly universal, but Moore's model faces certain
severe problems of feasibility.  I will discuss a modification of his
model that fares better, and whose behaviour is undecidable in a
stronger sense than that of, say, nearly integrable Hamiltonian systems.



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