Philosophy of Cosmology
Emerging Minds Colloquium Series
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Beginning January 2021, The Rotman Institute of Philosophy will be hosting the 'Emerging Minds' colloquium—a series of virtual talks delivered by members of the Institute and scholars from around the world. We invite you to take part by both presenting and attending, in order to network with others who are completing novel interdisciplinary work [...]
Emergence in Cosmology Workshop
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The early universe is described extremely well by linear perturbations evolving in a simple expanding universe model, described by classical general relativity. An approximately scale invariant spectrum of nearly Gaussian, adiabatic curvature fluctuations accounts for observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background as well as baryon acoustic oscillations. But how does this familiar classical [...]
Self-locating Uncertainty in the Cosmological Multiverse Workshop
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Several issues in cosmology have increasingly raised concerns about self-locating uncertainty. It seems to many that to understand how the universe originated and how it is, we need to better understand how to think about where we are in it, or where we should expect ourselves to be. On one hand, considerations of self-locating [...]
Philosophical Perspectives on Astrochemistry
Room 3000 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaAstrochemistry is a young discipline, which started with the unexpected detection of molecules in the interstellar medium in the 1940’s. Astrochemical models aim at describing the physicochemical processes explaining the composition in the interstellar medium or of planetary atmospheres, despite the fact that the models and the observations against which they must be validated are highly uncertain. These uncertainties, [...]