Eleanor Knox

Much of Eleanor’s work focuses on the foundations of spacetime physics. She advocates a view I call Spacetime Functionalism, which she think solves problems in classical theories as well as dealing with the challenges to standard accounts raised by emergent spacetime structure in theories of quantum gravity.

She is also interested in relationships between theories. She has argued that the kind of novelty that seems to be involved in cases that physicists call ’emergent’ is explanatory novelty, arising from particular kinds of changes of variables between theoretical description.

Before taking up a permanent lectureship at King’s, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Before that she was the Chandaria Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London, and before that she did a BA, BPhil and DPhil at Oxford University. In 2015, she received the Cushing Memorial Prize for History and Philosophy of Physics.