•  472
    Emergence without limits: The case of phonons
    with Alexander Franklin
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 64 68-78. 2018.
    Recent discussions of emergence in physics have focussed on the use of limiting relations, and often particularly on singular or asymptotic limits. We discuss a putative example of emergence that does not fit into this narrative: the case of phonons. These quasi-particles have some claim to be emergent, not least because the way in which they relate to the underlying crystal is almost precisely analogous to the way in which quantum particles relate to the underlying quantum field theory. But the…Read more
  •  141
    Several modern accounts of explanation acknowledge the importance of abstraction and idealization for our explanatory practice. However, once we allow a role for abstraction, questions remain. I ask whether the relation between explanations at different theoretical levels should be thought of wholly in terms of abstraction, and argue that changes of the quantities in terms of which we describe a system can lead to novel explanations that are not merely abstractions of some more detailed picture.…Read more
  •  136
    Newtonian Spacetime Structure in Light of the Equivalence Principle
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (4): 863-880. 2014.
    I argue that the best spacetime setting for Newtonian gravitation (NG) is the curved spacetime setting associated with geometrized Newtonian gravitation (GNG). Appreciation of the ‘Newtonian equivalence principle’ leads us to conclude that the gravitational field in NG itself is a gauge quantity, and that the freely falling frames are naturally identified with inertial frames. In this context, the spacetime structure of NG is represented not by the flat neo-Newtonian connection usually made expl…Read more
  •  134
    Newton–Cartan theory and teleparallel gravity: The force of a formulation
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 42 (4): 264-275. 2011.
  •  123
    Effective spacetime geometry
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (3): 346-356. 2013.
    I argue that the need to understand spacetime structure as emergent in quantum gravity is less radical and surprising it might appear. A clear understanding of the link between general relativity's geometrical structures and empirical geometry reveals that this empirical geometry is exactly the kind of thing that could be an effective and emergent matter. Furthermore, any theory with torsion will involve an effective geometry, even though these theories look, at first glance, like theories with …Read more
  •  110
    Physical relativity from a functionalist perspective
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 67 118-124. 2018.
    This paper looks at the relationship between spacetime functionalism and Harvey Brown’s dynamical relativity. One popular way of reading and extending Brown’s programme in the literature rests on viewing his position as a version of relationism. But a kind of spacetime functionalism extends the project in a different way, by focussing on the account Brown gives of the role of spacetime in relativistic theories. It is then possible to see this as giving a functional account of the concept of spac…Read more
  •  95
    Flavour-oscillation clocks and the geometricity of general relativity
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2): 433-452. 2010.
    I look at the ‘flavour-oscillation clocks’ proposed by D. V. Ahluwalia and two of his arguments suggesting that such clocks might behave in a way that threatens the geometricity of general relativity (GR). The first argument states that the behaviour of these clocks in the vicinity of a rotating gravitational source implies a non-geometrical element of gravity. I argue that the phenomenon is best seen as an instance of violation of the ‘clock hypothesis’ and therefore does not threaten the geome…Read more
  •  76
    The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the state of the art in the philosophy of physics. It contains 54 self-contained chapters written by leading philosophers of physics at both senior and junior levels, making it the most thorough and detailed volume of its type on the market – nearly every major perspective in the field is represented. The Companion’s 54 chapters are organized into 12 sections. The first seven sections cover all of the…Read more
  •  54
    On Constraints, Context, and Spatiotemporal Explanation
    with John Heron
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3): 732-738. 2019.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 732-738, November 2019.
  •  41
    The Ashgate Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Physics
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (2). 2011.
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 25, Issue 2, Page 199-202, June 2011
  •  35
    VII—Novel Explanation in the Special Sciences: Lessons from Physics
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (2): 123-140. 2017.
    This paper aims to understand how recent discussion of novel and robust behaviour in physics might be applied in biology and other special sciences. In particular, it looks at the prospects for extending an account of novel explanation to biological examples. Despite the differences in the disciplines, the prospects look good, at least when we look at a biological example in which a certain kind of reduction is possible.