Nottingham Centre of Gravity Inaugural Colloquia

As part of its launch, the Nottingham Centre of Gravity (NCoG) is organising a series of Inaugural Colloquia. The NCoG brings together Nottingham's internationally leading expertise in gravitational physics in the School of Mathematical Sciences and the School of Physics and Astronomy and plans to expand it into new areas. It will be built on six overlapping pillars of gravitational research: fundamental physics, mathematics, cosmology, relativistic astrophysics, experiment, and data & modeling. The six Inaugural Colloquia will span these fields.

The Colloquia will be broadcast via Zoom and all are welcome to attend. Please feel free to share this with friends and colleagues.

The schedule of talks is given below, with the first talk by Cumrun Vafa (Harvard) taking place on October 6, 2021. You can access all the talks through the following link:

https://zoom.us/j/91781483319

We also encourage participants to register by filling in the following form in order to receive reminders and updates of forthcoming talks:

https://forms.gle/Um9WWSUcQGB9GFRcA

NCoG colloquia schedule

October 6 2021, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Cumrun Vafa (Harvard)

Title: String Landscape and the Swampland

Abstract: String theory landscape of vacua point to new consistency conditions that a quantum gravitational system must satisfy. There are only a small number of quantum field theories that satisfy these conditions and all the rest belong to the `Swampland' which cannot be consistently coupled to gravity. In this talk I review some of these conditions and their implications for cosmology and particle physics.

December 8 2021, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Anna Watts (Amsterdam)

January 19 2022, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Mihalis Dafermos (Cambridge & Princeton)

February 23 2022, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Lam Hui (Columbia)

April 6 2022, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Sheila Rowan (Glasgow)

June 8 2021, 3pm UK time

Speaker: Luis Lehner (Perimeter)

Dear colleagues,

If you are interested in Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, Chinese logic, their formalism, and philosophy, don't miss the upcoming online event between August 30th and September 1st: https://orientallogic.ir

For any inquiry, feel free to write to me at a.s.daghighi@gmail.com

Best regards,

Ali Sadegh Daghighi, Ph.D.,

Member of the Organizing Committee,

Deputy Director at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Fundamental Sciences (IRFS)

https://alidaghighi.org/

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Postponed: Future Date https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/corauhlemann/uk-cosmo/

The next UK Cosmology Meeting will be held at Newcastle University on April 21-22, 2020. We will have two excellent invited speakers: Ana Achucarro (Leiden) and John Peacock (Edinburgh).

The meeting will be spread across two days (Tuesday afternoon-Wednesday morning) to allow participants to travel to/from Newcastle without hassle. In fact, Newcastle is only 3 hours by train from London. The programme, registration link and some travel advice can be found on our webpage: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/corauhlemann/uk-cosmo/

We hope that a lot of you will visit us in Newcastle! Thanks to the UK cosmo grant, up to £100 of overnight expenses can be covered as well as modest travel costs.

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Postponed: 12-16 July 2021 https://eaifr.org/events/dsu-2020/

13-17 July, Kigali, Rwanda

We are pleased to announce that the 16th edition of the Dark Side of the Universe (DSU) conference series will be held during 13-17 July 2020 in Kigali, Rwanda, at the East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR), a partner institute of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical physics (ICTP).

DSU is back in Africa after Cape Town 2014, and is the very first international conference on the topic in the heart of Africa. This is a great opportunity for the international community to support the event, meet local scientists and contribute to the scientific growth of the region.

About the conference:

DSU is a series of international conferences in astroparticle physics and cosmology. The workshops bring together a wide range of theorists and experimentalists to discuss current ideas on models of the dark sector of the Universe, and relate them to ongoing and future experiments. Topics covered include: dark matter, dark energy, cosmic rays, neutrino physics, large-scale structure, black holes, gravitational waves, physics beyond the standard model, and more. DSU2020, this year’s edition, is jointly organized by ICTP-EAIFR and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), in Trieste, Italy.

About ICTP-EAIFR:

EAIFR (https://eaifr.org/) is a category-2 UNESCO institute, with the specific mission of contributing to the development of scientific research in Africa. It is one node (the others being in Brazil, China and Mexico) of the global network of ICTP partner institutes promoting scientific education and collaborations in developing countries to bridge the research divide across different areas of the world. It is funded by the government of Rwanda, as part of its effort to make Rwanda a hub for science and technology in Africa, and operates in close collaboration with ICTP.

About Kigali and Rwanda:

You will find Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to be a great host. It is a fast growing modern city of 1.3 million people, yet very safe and clean, hospitable and laid back. Visitors can stroll in the bustling city center or across its many green areas, and lounge in rooftop bars with spectacular views of the city. Kigali enjoys constant temperatures all year round, 25-30°C during the day and 15-20°C during the night, and July falls in the dry season. Within a few hours from Kigali are the scenic Lake Kivu, the Akagera National Park and its wildlife, the Virunga volcanoes with their mountain gorillas and exciting trekking opportunities. Last but not least, the Kigali Genocide Memorial offers a journey through the recent history of Rwanda, its tragic fall and hopeful recovery.

Practical information:

The conference has no registration fee, and financial support may be granted to participants upon request within the availability of funds. Priority in this respect will be given to participants based in developing countries.

For more information, registration, abstract submission, and hotel booking, please visit our web pages:

https://eaifr.org/events/dsu-2020/

https://indico.ictp.
it/event/9097/

We look forward to welcoming you next July in Kigali!

The organizing committee:

Paolo Creminelli (ICTP)

Joern Kersten (Bergen U)

Roy Maartens (UWC, South Africa & Portsmouth)

Shoaib Munir (ICTP-EAIFR)

Marcello Musso (ICTP-EAIFR)

Riccardo Sturani (IIP, Brazil)

Filippo Vernizzi (IPhT, Saclay)

Gabrijela Zaharijas (Nova Gorica U)

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Postponed: Future Date https://liu.se/en/research/phenomenological-approaches-to-ph
ysics-conference-2020

The third Annual Phenomenological Approaches to Physics Conference "QBism and Phenomenology, Compared and Contrasted" will take place in Linköping on 15-17 June, 2020.

Time and Place

June 15-17, 2020. Linköping University, Campus Valla, Studenthuset.

https://liu.se/en/research/phenomenological-app
roaches-to-physics-conference-2020

Invited Speakers

Christopher Fuchs, UMass Boston, USA

Rüdiger Schack, University of London, UK

Thomas Ryckman, Stanford University, USA

Michel Bitbol, Ecole Normale Superieure, France

Robert Crease, Stony Brook University, USA

Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA

Organizers

Philipp Berghofer, Department of Philosophy, University of Graz, Austria

Jan-Åke Larsson, Department for Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden

Harald Wiltsche, Department for Culture and Communication, Linköping University, Sweden

Structure of the Conference

Two days are explicitly focused on the relation between phenomenology and QBism; the third day of the conference is thematically open to all aspects of the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of physics.

Call for Papers

Submissions should not exceed 500 words, must be written in English (conference language), and should be prepared for blind review. Please send your submissions and general inquiries to philipp.berghofer@uni-graz.at. Philosophers who are members of traditionally underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply. The submission deadline is February 15, 2020.

Conference Description

Partly due to recent interventions by philosophers of science with phenomenological leanings, it has become more common to argue that in order to clarify the nature of physical theories and the knowledge they encode, we must clarify the role physicists play when doing physics, for instance by focusing on the epistemic role of the physicists’ experiences and life-world. Following this trajectory, we might wonder whether we can expect physics to deliver a purely objective picture of the world, perhaps even grasping nature in its entirety, or whether, in principle, scientific observation, models, and theories must remain perspectival and can only reveal certain aspects of nature. Another crucial question concerns the relationship between observer and the observed in physical research. Can we make a clear-cut distinction between subject and object, or is there an intrinsic interrelatedness that has been overlooked in mainstream philosophy of science? As is well known, this latter question becomes particularly urgent in philosophical discussions about the foundations of quantum mechanics.

One novel and promising interpretation of quantum mechanics that sheds new light on these and related questions is Quantum Bayesianism or, as it is called since 2010, QBism. By emphasizing the role of the subject’s experiences and expectations, and by arguing that physical reality goes beyond what any third-person perspective could capture, QBism also exhibits several interesting parallels with topics dominant in the phenomenological tradition. The third installment of the annual phenomenological approaches to physics conference series thus compares and contrasts QBism and phenomenology, addressing how both approaches overlap and might enrich each other. Accordingly, the first two conference days are exclusively devoted to QBism and the question about its possible relationship to phenomenology. The third day is open to all kinds of investigations of how phenomenological motifs could and should enrich systematic debates in philosophy of physics.

The conference is organized with support from the Society for Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Science (SPSS) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at LiU.

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Postponed: 6-9 Sept 2021 https://indico.physics.auth.gr/e/NEB19

19th Conference on Recent Developments in Gravity, Athens, Greece

The 19th NEB conference on “Recent Developments in Gravity” will be held in Athens, Greece, from the 1st to the 4th of July 2020. NEB19 is an international conference devoted to all aspects of Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, which is organized every two years by the Hellenic Society for Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology. A list of previous conferences in the NEB series can be found at http://www.hsrgc.gr/activities.html.

The website of the conference is https://indico.physics.auth.gr/e/NEB19 and the registration deadline is March 1st, 2020.

NEB19 will focus on recent developments in several areas: gravitational waves, relativistic astrophysics, alternative theories of gravity, mathematical relativity, relativistic cosmology and quantum gravity.

The venue of the conference is the conference center of the Eugenides Foundation, near the coastal line of Faliro (located a few km south of the center of Athens).

The list of invited plenary speakers includes:

E. Berti (Johns Hopkins)

E. Gourgoulhon (Meudon)

R. Gregory (Durham)

M. Dafermos (Cambridge/Princeton)

S. Katsanevas (EGO-VIRGO)

K. Kokkotas (Tuebingen)

E. Plionis (NOA, Athens)

D. Psaltis (Arizona)

Th. Sotiriou (Nottingham)

M. Sakellariadou (King’s College)

S. Weinfurtner (Nottingham)

In addition, there will be a number of invited session speakers (to be announced). We welcome the submission of abstracts for talks in the parallel sessions and for the poster session.

We are looking forward to meeting all interested participants in Athens in July!

With our best regards,

The Organizing Committee

Ch. Charmousis (CNRS – University Paris-Saclay)

G. Pappas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

E. Saridakis (NTUA, Athens)

N. Stergioulas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

A. Zoupas (University of Thessaly)

______________________________________________

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