Speaker: Renato Renner (ETH Zürich) Date: Monday, 17 November 2014 Location: H030, Fakultät für Physik der LMU, Schellingstr. 4 Time: 17:15 - 19:00 Title: Is the wave function in one-to-one correspondence with reality? Abstract: The old question (considered already by Einstein) whether the quantum-mechanical wave function represents "reality" has recently attracted renewed interest. Amazingly, modern approaches inspired by Quantum Information Theory can provide answers. In my talk, I will provide an overview on them, focusing on a recent result that establishes a one-to-one correspondence between the wave function and the “elements of reality”. --------------------------------------- Speaker: Michael Stoeltzner (University of South Carolina/CAS/MCMP) Date: Wednesday, November 19 2014. Location: Ludwigstr. 31, ground floor, room 021 Time: 16:15 - 18:00 Title: The Varieties of Explanation in the Higgs Sector Abstract: I argue that there is no single universal conception of scientific explanation that is consistently employed throughout Higgs physics – ranging from the successful search for a standard model (SM) Higgs particle and the hitherto unsuccessful searches beyond it, to phenomenological model builders in the Higgs sector and theoretical physicists interested in the Higgs mechanism. But the coexistence of deductive-statistical, unificationist, model-based, and statistical-relevance explanations does not amount to a fragmentation of the discipline, but allows elementary particle physicists to simultaneously pursue a plurality of research strategies and keep the field together by joint convictions about the SM and shared explanatory ideals. Most importantly, the SM represents both a successful explanation and contains aspects in need of further explanation. Such explanatory ideals typically appear as stories or narratives motivating the different models and linking them to the whole of the discipline. --------------------------------------- Speaker: Chris Fuchs (University of Massachusetts at Boston) Date: Thursday, November 20, 2014 Location: Ludwigstr. 31, ground floor, room 021 Time: 18:15 - 20:00 Title: QBism, a Subjective Way to Take Ontic Indeterminism Dead Seriously Abstract: The term QBism, invented in 2009, initially stood for Quantum Bayesianism, a view of quantum theory a few of us had been developing since 1993. Eventually, however, I. J. Good's warning that there are 46,656 varieties of Bayesianism came to bite us, with some Bayesians feeling their good name had been hijacked. David Mermin suggested that the B in QBism should more accurately stand for "Bruno", as in Bruno de Finetti, so that we would at least get the variety of (subjective) Bayesianism right. The trouble is QBism incorporates a kind of metaphysics that even Bruno de Finetti might have rejected! So, trying to be as true to our story as possible, we momentarily toyed with the idea of associating the B with what Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called bettabilitarianism. It is the idea that the world is loose at the joints, that indeterminism plays a real role in the world. In the face of such a world, what is an active agent to do but /participate/ in the uncertainty that is all around him? As Louis Menand put it, "We cannot know what consequences the universe will attach to our choices, but we can bet on them, and we do it every day." This is what QBism says quantum theory is about: How to best place bets on the consequences of our actions in this quantum world. But what an ugly, ugly word, "bettabilitarianism"! Therefore, maybe one should just think of the B as standing for no word in particular, but a deep idea instead: That the world is so wired that our actions as active agents actually /matter/. Our actions and their consequences are not eliminable epiphenomena. In this talk, I will describe QBism as it presently stands and give some indication of the many things that remain to be developed. NOTE that Chris Fuchs' talk will follow one by Joseph Berkovitz (University of Toronto) on "A New Interpretation of De Finetti’s Theory of Subjective Probability" from 16:00 - 18:00 (more details at: http://www.mcmp.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/events/calendar/index.html)