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PHEP2022
March 26, 2022 - March 27, 2022
PHEP2022: Early Career Conference in Philosophy of Particle & High Energy Physics
Particle physics is at a critical juncture: recent monumental experimental work at the Large Hadron Collider led to the Higgs discovery, but has not produced further experimental evidence of new physics. Current searches for the theoretical particles that comprise dark matter candidates raise major methodological questions of their own and are bringing particle physics into close contact with cosmology and astrophysics. Meanwhile, philosophy of cosmology and astrophysics, and philosophy of quantum field theory as applied to the models used in mainstream physics, have been major growth areas of philosophical investigation in recent years.
Topics include philosophical investigation of:
- The significance of properties used in particle physics;
- The recent increase of ‘tabletop’ experiments for precision tests of the standard model;
- The variety of uses of renormalization and regularization techniques;
- The relationship between cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics;
- The methodological status of effective field theories;
- The role of simulations in cosmology and particle physics;
PHEP 2022 – Philosophy of High Energy Physics
Program
All talks take place in Lecture Room 1008 on the 10th floor of the Cathedral of Learning. Breaks will be in the Center for Philosophy of Science on the 11th floor. Talks will be 45 minutes long with 15 minutes for questions
Saturday 26th March
8:30am-9am: Registration and breakfast
9am-10am: Marian Gilton (University of Pittsburgh), “Rethinking Charge Properties”
10am-11am: Ryan Miller (University of Geneva), “Quark Composition of Nucleons”
11am-11:30am: Coffee break
11:30am-12:30pm: Dimitrios Athanasiou (Western University), “What Price a Rejection of Naturalness?”
12:30pm-2pm: Lunch break
2pm-3pm: Siska de Baerdemaeker (Stockholm University), “Into the Unknown: Exploring dark matter with stellar streams”
3pm-4pm: Antonis Antoniou (University of Bristol), “Models Without Theories?”
4pm-4:30pm: Coffee break
4:30pm-5:30pm: Siddharth Muthukrishnan (University of Pittsburgh), “Operational Versus Descriptive Black Hole Complementarity”
5:30pm-6:30pm: David Wallace (University of Pittsburgh), “Quantum Gravity at Low Energies”
Sunday 27th March
8:30am-9am: breakfast
9am-10am: Marie Gueguen (Institut de Physique of Rennes), “Fake Friends: Robustness and Reliability in Computational Astrophysics”
10am-11am: Josh Hunt (University of Michigan), “Manifest Properties and Good Variable Choices”
11am-11:30am: Coffee break
11:30am-12:30pm: Shannon Abelson (Indiana University Bloomington), “Simulation and Experiment Revisited”
12:30pm-2pm: Lunch break
2pm-3pm: Adam Koberinski (University of Waterloo), “Early Universe Particle Physics: Constructing the Effective Field Theory Worldview”
3pm-4pm: Patrick Shields (University of Notre Dame), “Against Literalism in Quantum Field Theory”
4pm-4:30pm: Coffee break
4:30pm-5:30pm: General discussion
5:30pm: close