RCNP really gets going

Although the RCNP had already been engaged in various activities throughout the previous academic year, such as the reading group and the first colloquium by Michel Janssen, the center really got going in September 2024 with the official arrival of Manus Visser and his PhD candidate Silvester Borsboom. All three Assistant Professors have now started, though we are still waiting for PhD candidate Karla Weingarten and Postdoc Martin Voggenauer to arrive in October. During their first week, the new members were toured around the departments, had cake, attended the first lectures, got installed at their desks etc. Furthermore, both the new and the old members of the RCNP were treated with a great talk by Jay Armas on Tuesday at the second RCNP colloquium about his book Conversations of Quantum Gravity.

Luckily, the members of the RCNP needed not despair that, after an eventful first week, they would have too much time on their hands during the weekend, since the RCNP also hosted the Weekend Seminar in Philosophy of Physics from 6-8 September, organised by Karla and Kian together with Annica Vieser, Niels Linnemann and Maren Bräutigam. Martin, our future Postdoc, was also present and led some of the discussion groups. The seminar was attended by a group of about 25 students with backgrounds in philosophy, physics and/or mathematics. Talks were given by various people, both from the RCNP and from other institutes in Europe, like Karen Crowther (Oslo), Vera Matarese (Perugia) and Patricia Palacios (Salzburg).

Below is a picture of the group of students and organisers gathered around the Foucault pendulum:

On Friday evening Klaas Landsman gave a challenging but highly interesting talk about entropy and the foundations of statistical mechanics:

The students were paying very close attention:

On Saturday afternoon Manus Visser talked about his research on the thermodynamic nature of (quantum) gravity:

On Sunday the seminar ended with a talk by Patricia Palacios, and the students went home with their heads filled to the brim with inspiring ideas from the philosophy of physics. Annica Vieser, from the University of Geneva, stayed another day to give a talk at the RCNP colloquium about functional reduction.

In the third week of September, the RCNP reading group recommenced with the text Fundamentality and Grounding by Kerry McKenzie. The week after, Silvester Borsboom spoke at the RCNP colloquium about his master thesis on the conceptual aspects of the Higgs mechanism. He brought some props, which clearly captivated the audience:

All in all, it was an inspiring first ''real'' month for the RCNP.