This year’s Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecture (public lecture) will be delivered by Prof. Sean Carroll ( March 3-4)

Theoretical physicist, philosopher, and science advocate—Sean Carroll’s research focuses on some of the most foundational questions about quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, and complexity. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and the host of the polymath podcast Mindscape.

URI’s annual Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecture, which is endowed by the trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences and named to honor the former director Dr. Alexander Cruickshank who was also the former head of Chemistry at URI.

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Schedule for 2025 Alexander M. Cruickshank Lecture

Monday, March 3

4:30pm :  Physics Colloquium, Bliss Hall, Room 190: Read more

Tuesday, March 4,

10:00am-12:00pm – Meeting with Groups : AstroSpace, East Hall, Room 217

Engineering, Math, Computer Science, Chemistry

1:00pm-3:00pm – Meeting with Groups: AstroSpace, East Hall, Room 217

Harrington School, Philosophy, English, History, Political Science

6:00pm: Reception and Book Signing, Beaupre Center for Chemical and Forensic Sciences, Room 100

7:00pm: Cruickshank Lecture by Sean Carroll; Beaupre Center for Chemical and Forensic Sciences, Room 100 

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Abstract for the Physics Colloquium

Extracting the Universe from the Wave Function

Quantum mechanics is a theory of evolving vectors in Hilbert space. Many features that we generally take for granted when we use quantum mechanics — classical spacetime, locality, the system/environment split, collapse/branching, preferred observables, the Born rule for probabilities — should in principle be derivable from the basic ingredients of the quantum state and the Hamiltonian. I will discuss recent progress on these problems, including consequences for emergent spacetime and quantum gravity.