The Beyond Spacetime project and the Geneva Symmetry Group are happy to announce a talk by Nick Huggett (University of Illinois, Chicago), who has been visiting the department for a month, and two talks by Erik Curiel (LMU Munich), who will be visiting this coming week.
On Wednesday, 15 March 2023, we will have the following talks (place note the location for Huggett’s talk!):
14:15-15:30, room IF 408 (IFAGE, Place des Augustins 19; location of the quodlibeta talks): Nick Huggett (UIC): Resolving the Problem of Time without circularity – a work in progress with Karim Thébault (Bristol)
16:15-17:45: room L208 (Landolt) Erik Curiel (LMU Munich): Energy, entropy and the intimate relations between the two in semi-classical gravity
This talk will be a joint session with the other Beyond Spacetime Centre at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Erik Curiel will be giving an informal seminar on Thursday in the context of MA seminar on the philosophy of black holes by Saakshi Dulani and Christian Wüthrich:
Thursday, 16 March 2023, at 16:15 in Room PHIL 002 (Philosophes):
Erik Curiel (LMU Munich): The Hawking effect, its desiderata and its discontents
Anyone who wishes to attend is welcome to either of the events.
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Abstracts:
Nick Huggett (UIC): Resolving the Problem of Time without circularity – a work in progress with Karim Thébault (Bristol)
Chua and Callender (2021) claim that the ‘time from no time’ program in quantum cosmology (the subject of Claus Kiefer’s talk) is viciously circular, for instance because in justifying the use of the Born-Oppenheimer and Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximations the program assumes temporal properties of the system. I will talk through the former, to show how its assumptions can be understood in non-temporal terms, so that its use to derive time in quantum cosmology can be justified without circularity. Indeed, we suggest that any apparently temporal property of a quantum system will supervene on a non-temporal one, so that any similar circularity argument will fail.
Reading: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18587/1/Approximations_in_CQG__PSA_-2.pdf
In terms of technical difficulty, this talk rates 4/5 Einsteins.
Erik Curiel (LMU Munich): Energy, entropy and the intimate relations between the two in semi-classical gravity
The relationship between energy and entropy in classical thermodynamics is a close one. They are, nonetheless, conceptually and physically distinguished, with regard to their intrinsic properties, their relations to other physical quantities and their roles in dynamics and governing general principles. In general relativity, their relations become closer. Several theoretical results and considerations in semi-classical gravity, however, suggest that, when one takes account of quantum effects in strong gravitational fields, they develop a much more intimate relationship. I review several of those results and discuss the role that energy conditions and entropy conditions play in them, attempting to tease out the ways that energy and entropy seem to share more of the same properties, play more of the same roles, than in classical thermodynamics or general relativity. I conclude by speculating on why this may be, what a more intimate relationship between them may look like in this framework, and what it may suggest for our understanding of semi-classical gravity and possibly even for some approaches to quantum gravity.
In terms of technical difficulty, this talk rates 4/5 Einsteins.
Geneva Symmetry Group 