Dr. Erik Curiel

Zur Person

I earned my A.B. as a double major in physics and philosophy at Harvard University, under the supervision of Profs. Hilary Putnam, Robert Nozick and Sheldon Glashow. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, working with Profs. David Malament and Howard Stein in philosophy. During that time, Profs. Robert Geroch and Robert Wald invited me to work with them and gave me a desk for four years as a graduate student in the Relativity Group at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago's Physics Department. I have held teaching and research positions at Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh (the Center for Philosophy of Science), the London School of Economics, Trinity College (University of Cambridge), University of Western Ontario (the Rotman Institute of Philosophy), and University of Bonn (The Center of Gravity). I am currently a research fellow at the MCMP, and (since 2017) Distinguished Scholar at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard (where I spend a couple of months every year). Between 2021 and 2023, I was co-PI in the QISS (Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime) international scientific consortium; since 2023, I have been co-PI at its successor, WoST (Without SpaceTime). I visit the Università degli Studi di Firenze for a couple of weeks every year as an Erasmus Fellow in the Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia; I was also a visiting professor there for the 2023 winter term. I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the Radio and Geoastronomy Division between 2018 and 2020, and I have been a visiting scholar for shorter terms at Politecnico di Milano in the Dipartimento di Matematica, the Harvard College Observatory, and the University of California, Irvine.

I think this is all pretty good for a kid originally hailing from Dallas, Georgia, a hamlet in the deep rural American South.

I was trained both as a philosopher and as a theoretical physicist because my interests include not only issues in each discipline separately but, even more, the overlap of the two. This comes not only from the philosophical side---so much of theoretical physics today is done in the absence of constraint by experimental data that it often resembles traditional philosophy, grappling with such issues as the nature of space and time, the character of physical quantities such as the entropy of a black hole, and even the appropriate scope and foundation of physical theory itself, being driven by conceptual analysis and Gedankenexperimente alone. My current work in these areas focuses on the intersection of general relativity, quantum field theory and thermodynamics, primarily in the physics of black holes, early-universe cosmology (including singularities), and related gravitational phenomena in the semi-classical regime. In general philosophy of science, I work primarily on the semantics of scientific theories and the structure of our knowledge in science and its epistemology, where I grouse a lot about the inadequacies of the semantic view of theories and the field's morbid focus on ontology. I'm trying to work out my own accounts, with a great deal of sympathy for and inspiration from the pragmatism of Peirce, Carnap and Howard Stein. On the purely philosophical side, I spend time working on the ancient Greeks, just because I love them---especially Plato, my favorite philosopher by far---and on the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. On the purely physics side, I enjoy working on the mathematical foundations of classical mechanics, various problems in classical general relativity, especially constructing more astrophysically realistic models of the interiors of perturbed black holes, and various problems in modeling the Hawking effect in semi-classical gravity. Really, though, I love to think and talk about almost anything---I fervently hold with Plato that all true philosophy happens in conversation. "Brotherhood of men comes not from community of thought but from consanguinity of mind."---Proust.

Forschungsinteressen

1. Philosophy of Physics (with an emphasis on how technical work relates to traditional philosophical problems): general relativity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, black hole thermodynamics, semi-classical gravity, classical analytical mechanics, non-relativistic quantum theory, classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, cosmology, quantum gravity
2. Philosophy of Science (with an emphasis on delineating and attempting to improve on the inadequacies of current and traditional views): semantics of scientific theories, scientific knowledge, reasoning and methodology, the relation between theory and experiment, the representation of the world by mathematics, confirmation, causation, individuality and identity of physical systems, realism/anti-realism
3. Theoretical Physics: classical general relativity (global and quasi-local structure, dynamics of black holes, gravitational energy); classical analytical mechanics (the geometry of Lagrangian mechanics); quantum field theory on curved spacetime, black hole thermodynamics, semi-classical gravity (the kinematics and dynamics of the Hawking effect, the Generalized Second Law)
4. Ancient Greek Philosophy: primarily Plato and Aristotle
5. History of Physics: primarily the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries
6. History of Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, Carnap, Quine, Anscombe, Geach, Putnam, Stein
7. American Pragmatism: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey
8. Philosophical Logic: theories of meaning and reference, subjunctive conditionals