Dear friends of Bell controversy
At last a bit more news about the symposium plans. Feel free to contact the organizers, whether in private or on this forum, if you have suggestions or would like to help out in any other way. But first a little summary of how we got here.
Three months ago I made the following announcement on the web site of the journal "Royal Society Open Source", in the thread devoted to the controversial paper by Joy Christian:
"To resolve our scientific differences in person rather than on internet forums, Joy Christian and I are planning a public symposium at Leiden University (Netherlands) centered on a presentation by Christian of his work. A debate between Gill and Christian will be moderated by Jay R. Yablon, whom we have each asked to privately mediate between us in this undertaking. The symposium will also include invited talks by other Bell critics and Bell supporters, panel discussions and further, moderated but open, debate. As we work toward this event, I will no longer be posting at this forum about our differences."
We are now at the stage of starting to write a proposal to the Lorentz Center in Leiden. It would be a "normal" one-week scientific workshop of quite intimate nature, i.e., few carefully selected participants, but it would also have a large one-day public symposium as the centerpiece. The next deadline for proposals to the Lorentz Center is Monday 30 September 2019. I envisage a multidisciplinary workshop on Bell inequalities (or if you prefer: Bell's theorem) and quantum foundations *and* about scientific controversy and science politics - thus the disciplines sociology of science, history of science, and philosophy of science are involved as well as physics and mathematics.
Below are links to the two relevant RSOS web pages, and to Lorentz Center mission and workshop organization.
Richard Gill
"Quantum correlations are weaved by the spinors of the Euclidean primitives" by Joy Christian,
published 30 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180526https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.180526 The mission of the Lorentz center:
https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/aim.php Information for workshop organizers:
https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/infoorg.php******************************************************************************************************************************
Mission Statement
The Lorentz Center is a national center for international workshops in all scientific disciplines. Our guiding philosophy is that innovative research thrives on interaction between creative researchers. Lorentz Center workshops focus on new collaborations and on interactions in highly diverse groups of researchers – international and with different scientific viewpoints as well as seniority, gender, and culture.
The Lorentz Center concept
At the Lorentz Center, groups of researchers are brought together to assess the status of a field and share results, problems, methods, and views on future directions of research. Groups can be accommodated in two dedicated venues: Lorentz Center@Oort and Lorentz Center@Snellius, optimized for group sizes up to 55 or 25 participants. Both provide personal working space for all participants, as well as lecture rooms and a casual common room. The workshops usually last 5 days, allowing participants to discuss their research in depth, through a combination of informal talks, working sessions, and discussions. New contacts and collaborations are typical outcomes of Lorentz Center workshops.
Workshops organized by researchers from different scientific backgrounds are welcomed as well as monodisciplinary workshops. Workshops can be proposed and organized by any researcher in any field of research, at any professional level, and from any country. Groups of organizers from institutions in different countries and/or the public and private sectors are encouraged. In short, the Lorentz Center is committed to stimulate diversity in all aspects. Application procedures are aimed at rapid evaluation, with a go/no-go decision within three months and your workshop taking place within sixteen months after the submission deadline. Proposals for workshops are peer-reviewed by the Scientific Advisory Boards. Currently, the advisory boards are astronomy, chemistry, informatics, life and medical sciences, mathematics, physics, the highly interdisciplinary computational sciences, and the NIAS-Lorentz board covering the social sciences and humanities.
The development of our workshop concept in the social sciences and humanities is supported by the NIAS-Lorentz Program, with the dedicated scientific advisory board mentioned above. In 2015 support from Leiden University allowed us to fully embrace the social sciences and humanities. With this expansion, it is our ambition that our workshop program will cover the full academic spectrum. The partnership with NIAS, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, was initiated in 2006. The NIAS-Lorentz program explicitly also encourages initiatives that bridge the natural and technical sciences with the social sciences and humanities. We already have a significant track record of successful interactions and we expect that the need for and significance of such meetings is growing.
Surrounded by excellence
The Lorentz Center is situated in the faculty of Science of Leiden University – the oldest university in the Netherlands. The two workshop venues are in the Oort and Snellius buildings, which also host the Leiden Institute of Physics, the Leiden Observatory (astronomy), the Mathematical Institute and the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science. The biology, chemistry and pharmacology departments are located in adjacent buildings. Leiden University also includes the faculties of archeology, humanities, law, social and behavioral sciences, and the Leiden University Medical Center which are all within 10 minutes by bicycle. The faculty of governance and global affairs in the Hague is 10 minutes by train. The other Dutch universities and research institutes can easily be reached by public transport; the universities in Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam and Utrecht are within one hour by train. Schiphol International Airport is reached by train in 20 minutes.
Support
The Lorentz Center receives structural financial support by Leiden University, the Dutch research councils and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO. The Lorentz Center also is granted funding for specific workshops by the Lorentz Fund, Netherlands eScience Center, Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire CECAM and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science KNAW.