Amit Hagar
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HPS Department |
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I was born and educated in Israel, where I received my B.A. (1996) and MA (2000) in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I wrote my M.A. thesis on the hole argument and the ontology of spacetime theories. My Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Chance and Time" (2004) was written in Vancouver in the University of British Columbia and concerns the foundations of statistical physics. It was also published as an expository book on the philosophy of physics in Israel. My main interests span the foundations of modern physics, especially the origin and source of the probabilities one encounters in statistical and quantum mechanics, the philosophy of time, and the notion of physical computation, especially in the context of quantum information theory. I am currently engaged in several projects in those fields. My recent project on fault-tolerant quantum computation was funded by the National Science Foundation's Scholar Award (Grant # SES 0847547). The NSF is also funding my current project on the history & the philosophy of the notion of fundamental length in modern physics (Grant # SES 0951179).