Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 8, TT19)

Please note that the seminar for this week has been rescheduled, originally planned for Week 6.

What can observers know about their future and their own spacetime on the basis of their past lightcones? Important contributions to this question were made by Earman, Geroch, Glymour, Malament and more recently Manchak. Building on the work of Malament, Manchak (2009/10/11/14) has been able to prove what seem to be general and far reaching results to the effect that observers in general relativistic spacetimes face severe epistemic constraints. Here, after reviewing these results, I shall present a number of new results which grant observers a more positive epistemic status. So in short: if Malament and Manchak's results were cause for a form of epistemic pessimism, then the ones presented here will strive for a more optimistic outlook.

It will be streamed live, and can be viewed later, from the link: https://bit.ly/2WQJVmv