Philosophy of High Energy Physics (PHEP-2)

Philosophy of High Energy Physics (PHEP-2) Workshop Dates: February 15-16, 2025

The second Pittsburgh workshop on philosophy of particle and high energy physics will be held at the Center for Philosophy of Science on 15th-16th February 2025. The theme is construed broadly to include cosmology, astrophysics, quantum gravity and quantum field theory insofar as they overlap with issues in high-energy physics.

Session 1 (Saturday am)
Chair: David Wallace

8am Continental Breakfast

9am Opening remarks

9:05am Marian Gilton: “Where counting counts: Defending a particle interpretation of interacting
quantum field theory”

10:10am Michael Miller: “Full precision and its failure”

11:10am Coffee

11:30am Lu Chen: “What QFT realism should be like”

12:15pm Benjamin Feintzeig: “The emergence of localizable particles in the Non-Relativistic Limit in Quantum Field Theory”

Lunch: 1pm-3pm (on your own in Pittsburgh)

Session 2 (Saturday pm)
Chair: Porter Williams                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

3pm                       Lu Chen: “What QFT realism should be like”

3:45pm                  Doreen Fraser: “The measurement problem in QFT”

4:30pm                  Coffee (Center, 11th floor)

4:45pm                  Laura Ruetsche: “Scale invaders and subversive surrogates”

5:45pm                  close

Conference dinner (invitation only; all speakers are invited): 7pm, Courtyard Marriott

Session 3 (Sunday am)
Chair: Marian Gilton

8:30am Continental Breakfast

9am Siddharth Muthukrishnan: “Unruh, Hawking, and equivalence”

10:05am David Wallace: “Black hole complementarity from the effective-field-theory perspective”

11:05am Coffee

11:30am Sebastien Rivat: “Still no peace on the lattice”

12:15pm Michael Schneider: “Revisiting efforts to decouple early universe cosmology and quantum gravity phenomenology”

Lunch: 1pm-3pm (on your own in Pittsburgh)

Session 4 (Sunday pm)
Chair: Siddharth Muthukrishnan                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

3pm                      Chris Smeenk: “Inflation as an effective field theory”                     

4pm                      Coffee (Center, 11th floor)                                                           

4:15pm                 Adam Koberinski: “The breakdown of effective field theory beyond the   Standard Model”                                                                                                         

5:15pm                 Closing remarks