FraMEPhys

FraMEPhys – A Framework for Metaphysical Explanation in Physics – was a five year research project developing a new account of the contribution of metaphysics to how physics explains our world.

It was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant of €1.5m, and led by Dr Alastair Wilson, then of the Department of Philosophy.

Dr Wilson will be assisted by two postdoctoral fellows and a PhD student. The project runs from January 2018 to December 2022 and will feature an extensive program of workshops, conferences and outreach activities. The aim is to transform the way philosophers think about the nature of explanation, and to enhance our understanding of what physics is telling us about the deepest features of the natural world.

• For details of project activities on the FraMEPhys website

The FraMEPhys project team investigated the features that are had in common by the forms of explanation that feature in our most abstract and fundamental physical theories and by the ‘grounding’ explanations more usually studied in contemporary metaphysics.

These distinctive metaphysical explanations include the way in which the temperature of a gas depends on the motion of its molecules, the way in which the solidity of a table depends on the chemical bonding forces holding it together, and the way in which life itself depends on organised self-sustaining metabolic processes.

The new general framework developed by FraMEPhys will enable greater understanding of such explanations in physics, generalising approaches that have been employed successfully in recent empirical science for modelling more familiar causal explanations. The new framework will then be applied to three challenging cases of explanation in the philosophy of physics – the geometry of spacetime, time travel around causal loops, and entanglement between quantum particles.

Alastair Wilson works in metaphysics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of science and epistemology. As PI of FraMEPhys he will be developing a new general framework for understanding non-causal forms of explanation as they are employed in physics. Prior to FraMEPhys, his research focus has been on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, culminating in his book The Nature of Contingency which is out now from Oxford University Press.

Katie Robertson joined FraMEPhys as a Research Fellow in October 2018, after PhD research at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her main area of interest is philosophy of physics and she is currently working in the philosophy of statistical mechanics. Before coming to Cambridge, Katie received the BPhil at Oxford (University College) and prior to that she completed her MSci in Physics and Philosophy at Bristol. Katie has recently been awarded a three-year Early Career Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust, to be hosted at the University of Birmingham and to start in 2021. Katie’s project is called ‘Increasing entropy: from black holes to the direction of time’ and it links directly into her research with FraMEPhys..

Michael Townsen Hicks joined FraMEPhys as a Research Fellow in September 2019. He is mostly interested in the ways we use scientific laws and models to understand what’s possible, and what isn’t. Previously he was a wissenschaftlicher mitarbeiter at the Universität zu Köln in Cologne, Germany, and a research fellow on the Consolidation of Fine-Tuning project at the University of Oxford. He did his PhD thesis under Barry Loewer at Rutgers University.

Noelia Iranzo Ribera is a PhD candidate within the FraMEPhys project at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Birmingham. She holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Barcelona, where she followed a minor in Fundamental Physics, and a MSc in History and Philosophy of Science from Utrecht University. Her interests comprise mainly the fields of foundations of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and feminist epistemology. Causation - the common thread underlying all her research interests - is the reason why Noelia got interested in the project in the first place. She hopes to contribute to FraMEPhys’s research by focusing on the case study of quantum entangled systems, aiming to characterize the causal relation between entangled states of a composite system and clarify the relationship between this type of causation and the so-called ‘arrow of time’.

Dan Marshall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University and was a Visiting Fellow within the FraMEPhys project during June 2019. He and works in metaphysics and in related areas in logic and the philosophy of science; during his visit to FraMEPhys he worked on explanation, facts and grounding and presented at a project seminar and workshop.

Francis Longworth is the Project Administrator for FraMEPhys and joined in January 2020. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ohio University. He did his PhD under John Norton and John Earman at the University of Pittsburgh and was also a Visiting Graduate Student at MIT. He also works in the Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Birmingham, where his interests are causal modelling and Bayesianism as they relate to the methodology of clinical trials.