I read Physics and Philosophy as an undergraduate at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and stayed-on there to take the BPhil and DPhil degrees. I was then a lecturer at the University of Leeds for three years, before returning to Oxford in 2007 to join Brasenose as a tutorial fellow in philosophy. In Oxford I have held various leadership roles, including as Dean of the college, and as Faculty Board Chair (head of department) of the Philosophy Faculty in Oxford.

Broadly, I teach modern theoretical philosophy. Besides philosophy of physics and general philosophy of science, this includes metaphysics, epistemology, logic and the philosophy of language. I also have interests in Wittgenstein (early and late), the history of 20th Century analytic philosophy, and philosophy of mind.

I teach all of the theoretical philosophy components of our first year courses: general philosophy (introductory metaphysics and epistemology), logic (including the more advanced Philosophical Topics in Logic and Probability course), the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (for Physics and Philosophy), Frege’s ‘Foundations of Arithmetic’ (for Maths and Philosophy), and Turing (for Computer Science and Philosophy).

For second, third and fourth year undergraduates, I generally teach Intermediate and Advanced Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Knowledge and Reality, Philosophical Logic and the Philosophy of Language, and Wittgenstein.

My research is primarily in the philosophy of physics. I study the foundations of quantum theory – what the theory means, how we should understand it, what the quantum world is like. I have also studied the impact of quantum information theory and quantum computation on these questions. A good deal of this work is interdisciplinary and I regularly collaborate with colleagues in Physics, Computer Science, and Materials Science in Oxford. I have also explored areas where quantum theory connects with other parts of physics – with the foundations of thermal physics (thermodynamics and statistical mechanics), and with spacetime theory, including the thermodynamics of black holes. Current projects include a collaboration to measure quantum properties (Bell inequality violation and the presence of entanglement) in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Featured in ‘A New Kind of Experiment at the LHC Could Unravel Quantum Reality’ New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234881-800-a-new-kind-of-experiment-at-the-lhc-could-unravel-quantum-reality/

Podcast, Great Mysteries of Physics 4: Does Objective Reality Exist? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/great-mysteries-of-physics-4-does-objective-reality-exist-202550