Eleanor Knox/ Bryan Roberts/ Mairi Sakellariadou
Listen to the recording here
Galileo famously wrote that natural philosophy is ‘written in the language of mathematics’. Four hundred years later, the great physicist Eugene Wigner puzzled over why. Why is it that abstract pieces of mathematics, like an imaginary number, often later turn out to be surprisingly effective in describing concrete aspects of the natural world? In this event, philosophers of physics and a theoretical physicist ponder Wigner’s question.
Speakers
Bryan Roberts
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Fellow, Forum for Philosophy
Mairi Sakellariadou
Professor of Theoretical Physics, King’s College London
Chair
Eleanor Knox
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, King’s College London
Recorded on 1 May 2014 at the LSE
