RCNP is finally complete and looks back on a productive fall of 2025

On 1 October 2025, the structure of the RCNP as originally envisioned, i.e. with a tripartite structure represented by three permanent faculty with their respective PhD students, was finally completed with the arrival of Fleur Hubau MSc MA. Fleur will be studying the history and philosophy of chaos theory in physics, under the supervision of Marij van Strien. This line of research is right at the heart of the RCNP's aim to understand the emergence of an apparently deterministic reality from some underlying form of chaotic or random behaviour.

In a similar vein, Nino Dekkers MSc, a former mathematical physics student in Nijmegen, started his PhD project under the joint supervision of Mark Peletier (TU Eindhoven) and Klaas Landsman. Nino works on algorithmic randomness and large deviations theory in the foundations of statistical mechanics, with the aim to understand the emergence of irreversible behaviour from reversible dynamics.

With these new PhD candidates having arrived, the RCNP office E18.02 was quite busy and vibrant, leading to many thought-provoking discussions on the history and foundations of physics. Throughout September, Matěj Krátký from the University of Geneva joined the RCNP as a visiting PhD student, bringing expertise on the intersection of philosophy of science and modern high-energy physics. He gave a talk on Arrows of Time in the Dapppled World, combining Nancy Cartwright's work with current research on the arrow of time. Earlier that month, we also had Maria Papageorgiou from IQOQI Vienna talk about relativistic quantum measurement, and Frans van Lunteren from Leiden University discuss Physics as Religion. The remainder of the fall saw talks by Carina Prunkl, Nicholas Rebol, Guy Hetzroni, Sanne Vergouwen and Lucy James, most of which can be watched back here. During the same period, we read Bryan Roberts' book Reversing the Arrow of Time. All in all, it was a highly productive fall!

To celebrate this, we treated ourselves to a table at the Raboud Christmas dinner:

But it did not end there, as we also had the honour of receiving Eleanor March from the Universities of Irvine and Oxford, who won the 2025 Hanneke Janssen Memorial Prize. Impressively, she first gave a three-hour seminar at the RCNP explaining her thesis work (supervised by James Read, making this the first time a winning thesis was submitted by a past laureate), and then gave another talk about her work for a more general audience in the Titus Brandsma room at Huize Heyendaal, attended online by James Read and Fransesca Vidotto: