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Dean Rickles

Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, University of Sydney

Dean Rickles is Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and a Director of the Sydney Centre for Time.

Rickles received his PhD from the University of Leeds, under the supervision of Steven French, with a thesis on conceptual issues in quantum gravity. He took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary split between health sciences and philosophy), on the application of complex systems theory to population health. He joined the department of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in 2007, receiving a 5-year ARC Australian Research Fellowship in 2008 and a 4-year ARC Future Fellowship in 2014. He is director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and is also co-leader on a Templeton Foundation-funded interdisciplinary project on the flow of time.

His primary research focus is the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly quantum gravity and spacetime physics. However, he also has strong interests in econophysics, population health, and musicology.




Books

The Ashgate Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Physics

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Structural Realism: Structure, Object, and Causality (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science)

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The Role of Gravitation in Physics

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A Brief History of String Theory: From Dual Models to M-Theory (The Frontiers Collection)

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Symmetry, Structure, and Spacetime, Volume 3 (Philosophy and Foundations of Physics)

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The Structural Foundations of Quantum Gravity

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