28 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American philosopher working on fundamentality, the wave function as a physical ontology, and the philosophy of physics.
British astrophysicist who confirmed Einstein's general relativity through the 1919 solar eclipse expedition and developed influential philosophical ideas about the arrow of time and the nature of physical reality.
American philosopher who has contributed to Humean metaphysics, the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and the Mentaculus account of the laws of nature and time's arrow.
Dutch-American philosopher of science who developed constructive empiricism — science aims at empirical adequacy, not truth about unobservable entities — challenging scientific realism.
American philosopher who has worked on the arrow of time, thermodynamics, and the metaphysics of time — arguing that the asymmetries we associate with time's direction are not metaphysically fundamental.
American philosopher of physics who has developed influential accounts of quantum mechanics (emphasizing the measurement problem) and time (the Past Hypothesis as the source of time's arrow).
Dutch philosopher of physics who developed the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics and has worked on time, becoming, and the foundations of statistical mechanics.
German-Israeli philosopher of physics working on the foundations of statistical mechanics and Bohmian quantum mechanics.
Austrian physicist who developed wave mechanics (the Schrödinger equation) as an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics, and whose book What Is Life? predicted the existence of a genetic code before DNA was discovered.
Hungarian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 and posed two famous philosophical puzzles: Wigner's Friend (a challenge to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics) and the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
Dutch-American philosopher who has worked on the metaphysics of space and time, causation, and the paradoxes of infinity.
South African cosmologist who co-authored with Stephen Hawking The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time and has argued against the multiverse and for the reality of top-down causation in complex systems.
British philosopher who has defended the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics using decision theory and has contributed to population ethics and global priorities research.
Australian philosopher who has argued for a perspectivalist account of time's arrow, advocated retrocausality in quantum mechanics, and developed a pragmatist metaethics.
American philosopher of physics who has made foundational contributions to the philosophy of spacetime, determinism, and Bayesian confirmation theory.
American philosopher of physics who has worked on Einsteinian physics, thought experiments, and developed a material theory of induction.
British physicist who has argued that time does not exist as a fundamental feature of the universe — the appearance of time arises from a static configuration space (Platonia).
Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the wave function never collapses — instead, at each 'measurement' the universe branches into multiple worlds, each realizing one possible outcome.
Argentinian physicist who worked on quantum decoherence, the arrow of time, and the foundations of statistical mechanics.
German philosopher of physics working on the ontology of quantum mechanics, particularly the status of the wave function.
Israeli-American philosopher who extended Wigner's puzzle into a systematic philosophical analysis of the applicability of mathematics to physics.
Italian philosopher of physics who has worked on the relationship between physics and time, defending a sophisticated B-theoretic position that accommodates the felt passage of time.
Argentinian philosopher who has worked on the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the philosophy of thermodynamics.
American theoretical physicist and philosopher who has argued for the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, a naturalistic account of emergent time, and a 'poetic naturalism' where all ontological levels are valid.
Canadian philosopher who has worked on the flow of time and the challenge posed by special relativity to the idea of a universal present.
American philosopher of physics who has advocated for a robust metaphysics of the physical world — defending the reality of laws of nature, the arrow of time, and Bohmian quantum mechanics.
David Albert's account of the thermodynamic arrow of time, arguing that the direction of time derives from the Past Hypothesis — the universe's special low-entropy initial condition.
Polish philosopher who worked on the metaphysics of time from an analytic perspective.