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Talks - 40 min + 20 min questions (speakers will have the freedom to decide whether to talk 50 min + 10 min questions or another combination)
Only a laptop (with a projector) for the presentations will be available

If you are not bringing your laptop, make sure that your presentation is in PowerPoint (Windows) or PDF. There will be no Mac laptop for KeyNote files. If your presentation is created by using LibreOffice, OpenOffice or any other software, make sure that you convert it to one of the two formats supported at the meeting.

As a small "Thank you" the session chairs will be invited to Cafe Panorama on the 15th floor of Hotel Dobrudja for coffee and delicious Garash torta (Tuesday, May 15, 2018 from 14:00 to 14:50). Also invited are colleagues who attended more than one meeting organized by the Minkowski Institute. Update: this year the event will be on the 17th floor also with an excellent sea view.

Monday, May 14, 2018

8:30 - Registration

8:55 - 9:00 Welcome Remarks

Chair: Tomasz Placek (Jagiellonian University)

10:00-10:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

10:30-11:30 - Pablo Acuna (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso), Dynamics and chronogeometric structure in spacetime theories

12:30-13:30 - Lunch

13:30-15:00 - Free discussions

Chair: Mohammed Sanduk (University of Surrey)

15:00-16:00 - Damian Luty (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan), Too distant worlds. Spacetime Structural Realism and Physicality

16:00-17:00 - Garnet Ord (Ryerson University), Algorithms, theories and ontology; spacetime from the perspective of statistical mechanics

17:00:17:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

17:30-18:30 - Uri Ben-Ya'acov (School of Engineering, Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee), Proper-time measurement in accelerated relativistic systems

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Chair: Pablo Acuna (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso)

10:00-10:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

10:30-11:30 - Pieter Thyssen (KU Leuven, Institute of Philosophy), Conventionality and Reality

11:30-12:30 - Anguel S. Stefanov (Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge at BAS), The growing block can hardly explain the experience of time flow

12:30-13:30 - Lunch

13:30-15:00 - Free discussions

Chair: Antoine van de Ven (Alumnus of Utrecht University)

15:00-16:00 - Vesselin Petkov (Minkowski Institute, Montreal), Can a worldview contradict experiment: can experiment decide whether spacetime represents an evolving present, a block universe or a growing block universe?

16:00-17:00 - Cristi Stoica (National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering - Horia Hulubei, Bucharest), The post-determined block universe

17:00:17:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

17:30-18:30 - Uri Ben-Ya'acov (School of Engineering, Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee), The implication of Godel's incompleteness theorem on our apprehension of the nature of space-time

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Chair: Fedde Benedictus (Managing editor, Foundations of Physics)

9:00-10:00 - Niels Martens (RWTH Aachen University) & Dennis Lehmkuhl (California Institute of Technology), Dark Matter = Modified Gravity? Scrutinising the spacetime-matter distinction through the modified gravity / dark matter lens

10:00-10:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

10:30-11:30 - Alexei Kojevnikov (University of British Columbia), Space-Time in Upheaval: Relativistic Cosmology and the End of a Static Universe

11:30-12:30 - Daniel Coumbe (Niels Bohr Institute), Renormalizing Spacetime (time and day will be changed shortly)

12:30-13:30 - Lunch

14:00-15:00 - Free discussions - Special session on the Nature of Time

Chair: Pieter Thyssen (KU Leuven, Institute of Philosophy)

15:00-16:00 - Antoine van de Ven (Alumnus of Utrecht University), Extended Space-Propertime Diagrams

16:00-17:00 - Doug Sweetser, Enforcing the Unity of Space and Time using Quaternions

17:00:17:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

17:30-18:30 - Colin MacLaurin, Slicing the Schwarzschild spacetime block

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Chair: Garnet Ord (Ryerson University)

10:00-10:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

10:30-11:30 - Mohammed Sanduk (University of Surrey), The ontology of spacetime and the ontology of the wave function!

12:30-13:30 - Lunch

14:00-15:00 - Free discussions - Special session on the Nature of Time

Chair: Peter Bongaarts (Leiden, Rotterdam)

15:00-16:00 - Jan Pilotti, How Einstein and Minkowski missed real valued Lorentz transformations for v>c which are possible in 2D and in extended special relativity to 6D spacetime (three space three time) and its possible relation to the nature of spacetime and consciousness

16:00-17:00 - Philip Carter, For Imaginary Dimensions and Causal Brane-Worlds

17:00:17:30 - Coffee break and free discussions

17:30-18:30 - Nick Astraeus, A Ridiculous Theory of Dark Energy

You can download all abstracts as a single PDF file - prepared by Doug Sweetser.

If needed - Guidelines for Session Chairs: APS; IMRA

Conference room: