29-30 June 2022 – Bonn, Germany

Submission deadline: 21 March 2022

Registration deadline: 1 June 2022

speakers | submission | registration | schedule | venue | contact

The DFG-funded research unit Epistemology of the LHC is organising a two-day conference on the history, philosophy and sociology of cosmology and astroparticle physics. This event follows up on the 2019 conference in Aachen on dark matter & modified gravity, a special journal issue on the same topic, and the 2021 online workshop on the philosophy of dark matter. The conference will take place on the 29th and 30th of June 2022 in Bonn, Germany. Philosophers, physicists, historians, sociologists and other interested scholars are invited to attend. 

Over the past few decades, cosmology, astronomy and particle physics have developed in different directions and at the same time become intertwined in an increasingly complex way, i.e., in terms of communities, theories, models, experiments, constraints, conferences and journals. Prime examples at the intersection of two or all three of these fields are the search for dark matter, cosmic rays, and neutrino physics. In recent years, various humanities—in particular the trio of history, philosophy & sociology (HPS)—have paid increasing attention to cosmology, astronomy and particle physics (CAP). It is the aim of this HPS-CAP conference to explore the history, philosophy and sociology of the intersection of CAP, as well as the interactions between history, philosophy & sociology of CAP. Research topics include but are not limited to the following:

• The history of the formation of and interaction between the scientific disciplines

• Cosmology, astronomy, particle physics & the scientific realism debate

• Communities across CAP

• Epistemology of experiments, simulation and observation

• The interplay between constraints from cosmology, astronomy and particle physics

• Cosmology and astronomy as historical sciences

• Guiding principles within CAP (cosmological principle, anthropic principle, unification, …)

• Dark matter, neutrinos and cosmic rays

• Searches for “theories of everything”

• Physics of scales (renormalization group methods, multi-scale modeling, inter-theory relationships, emergence and reduction)

• The relationship between the humanities and CAP

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
(more to be added soon)

Speakers:

Marie Gueguen, Institute of Physics of Rennes 1 (France) | web
Gauvain Leconte-Chevillard, Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris (France)| web
Luis Reyes-Galindo, Wageningen University (The Netherlands) | web
Adrien de Sutter, Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) | web

Official pre-event (28 June, 16:15-17:45, Nussallee 9):

Nora Boyd, Siena College (USA) | web

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

We invite contributing speakers from physics and from philosophy, history and sociology of physics, as well as anyone else who may be interested, to submit an abstract of 250-500 words by the 21^st of March 2022 as a pdf to nmartens[at]uni-bonn.de. We intend to have selected contributing speakers by end of April.

REGISTRATION

Registration details will be announced soon.

SCHEDULE

The schedule will be announced by the end of April.

Practical Information and Location Details

The venue of the conference is the Universitätsclub Bonn, Konviktstraße 9, 53113 Bonn.

The following airports are nearby:

Cologne-Bonn. Intercontinental airport.

Düsseldorf. Third-largest intercontinental airport in Germany.

Frankfurt (am Main). Largest intercontinental airport in Germany.

1h40 by RE (i.e. Regional Express, the least expensive trains) to Bonn Hauptbahnhof (central station) or 0h45 by ICE (more expensive than RE, and are best booked in advance to reduce costs) to "Bonn / Siegburg" and continue with the Metro line 66 to "Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz."

A taxi from "Bonn / Siegburg" is about 30€.