Please mark your calendar for an upcoming workshop, Philosophy of Dark Energy, to be held in at UC Irvine. If you are interested in attending, please contact Deborah Fox. A workshop schedule will be available soon.
DESCRIPTION
Philosophy of Dark Energy Workshop
March 8 – 10, 2019
University of California, Irvine
In the late 1990s, scientists working on the High-Z Supernovae Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project provided the first evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. To explain this acceleration, cosmologists have posited “dark energy”, a previously unknown kind of energy now believed to permeate all of space and to make up approximately 70% of the total energy of the universe. But what is dark energy? Is it the vacuum energy associated with known particle species? Or is it a manifestation of an entirely new entity? Or is it simply a reflection of a non-zero value for Einstein’s “cosmological constant”? This workshop will bring together physicists and philosophers to explore the epistemological and methodological issues raised by dark energy, with a focus on understanding the theoretical motivations and empirical evidence for different proposals concerning its nature.
Invited Speakers:
Luca Amendola (Institute of Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg), The ever-changing dark energy
Robert Brandenberger (McGill University), Dynamical Relaxation of the Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy
Robert Caldwell (Dartmouth College), Dark Energy Needs Dark Radiation
Sean Carroll (Caltech University), Holography, Hilbert Space, and the Cosmological Constant
Anne-Christine Davis (University of Cambridge), Recent developments in Modified Gravity and Chameleons
Paul Hamilton, University of California, Los Angeles
Lavinia Heisenberg, Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich
Dragan Huterer (University of Michigan), Dark Energy Two Decades After: Cosmological Probes and Consistency Tests
Jim Peebles (Princeton University), Finding LambdaCDM
Thomas Ryckman, Stanford University
Daniela Saadeh (University of Nottingham), Dark energy: can the fifth force be screened?
Chris Smeenk, University of Western Ontario
Shinji Tsujikawa, Tokyo University of Science
David Wallace, University of Southern California
This event is made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, to Chris Smeenk and Jim Weatherall.