Dr. Martin King

Personal information

Martin King is a postdoctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy where he has been working on his DFG individual grant project "Deep Learning in Particle Physics: A Philosophical Analysis" since October 2022. Prior to that, he was Postdoctoral Researcher for the DFG-funded research unit "Epistemology of the LHC" at the Physics Institutes at the University of Bonn and at the University of Wuppertal from 2016 to 2022. He received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada in 2016. Martin is also a member of the Lichtenberg Group for the History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn.

Research interests

Martin's research interests are in philosophy of science, the philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. In publications, he has contributed to debates on scientific explanation, confirmation, and modelling as they pertain to physics, and in particular, particle physics. He is currently working on the epistemological issues surrounding the use of artificial intelligence (in particular deep learning), the change in scientific methodology, and the transformation and treatment of huge amounts of data in searches for new physics.

Selected publications

1. Doing More with Less: Dark Matter & Modified Gravity (2023) in: Mills Boyd, N., De
   Baerdemaeker, S., Heng, K., Matarese, V. (eds) Philosophy of Astrophysics Synthese Library, Vol. 472. pp. 91–107, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-26618-8-6
2. Introduction: Simplicity out of complexity?: physics and the aims of science, (2023)
   Synthese Topical Collection vol. 199, with F. Boge, P. Gruenke, and M. A. Carratero Sahuquiho.
3. Universality is not Universal: how much can we explain with falsehoods? (2022) Metascience.
4. Bottoms Up: The Standard Model Effective Field Theory from a Model Perspective (2022)
   Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 92, pp. 129–143, with P. Bechtle, C. Chall, M. Kraemer, P. Maettig, and M. Stoeltzner.
5. Conjectures and Disconfirmations: Confirming the Standard Model Higgs (2021) Erkenntnis,
   DOI: 10.1007/s10670-021-00473-y
6. Explanations and candidate explanations in physics (2020) European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 10(1) pp. 1–17.
7. From a Boson to the Standard Model Higgs: a Case Study in Confirmation and Model
   Dynamics (2018) Synthese SI: Reasoning in Physics, pp. 1–33, with C. Chall, P. Maettig, and M. Stoeltzner.
8. On structural accounts of model-explanations (2016) Synthese, 193(9) pp. 2761–2778.