Sam Bysh
I'm a philosophy PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago, focussing on the philosophy of physics and working under the supervision of Nick Huggett. My dissertation research focusses on virtual particles in quantum field theory. Some previous work focussed on the philosophy of spacetime and quantum gravity. See my research page for more about this.
Before moving Chicago, I was born, raised and educated in London, studying undergraduate physics and philosophy at King's College London followed by a master's in theoretical physics at Imperial College London.
I came to philosophy via politics. I first properly encountered philosophy as a discipline in my final year of A-level politics, where the quite inspirational Mr. Granath (RIP) taught us anarchism, feminism, and ecologism and many other ideas from political philosophy. The seeds of my interest in the philosophy of science began to germinate when I learned about scientific realism, and the idea of structural realism in particular, in my undergraduate philosophy of science class, taught by Eleanor Knox. When studying the philosophy of quantum mechanics, also with Eleanor, and finally coming to comprehend many of the ideas I could calculate in physics but didn't really understand philosophically, I became determined to pursue graduate study in the philosophy of physics. This was also helped by some inspiring graduate and postgraduate students while I was at King's, in particular James Read, Koshka Duff, and Ádám Fekete. In my master's in theoretical physics, I was inspired most of all by learning about particle symmetries with Dan Waldram and the Einstein-Cartan version of general relativity with João Magueijo. I did my dissertation with João and was determined to work on some aspect of quantum gravity when back in philosophy. As things have turned out, I've ended up thinking about particles.
I applied to US universities for graduate study because I wanted to fill in some of the gulfs in my knowledge of philosophy on the way to writing my dissertation. I'm very glad I did. Now I have an interest in Aristotle, personal identity, Stanley Cavell and various other topics about which I didn't know an awful lot before, and my understanding of political philosophy and the philosophy of physics have been deepened, too. I feel fantastically fortunate to have ended up in Chicago (a wonderful city) and working with Nick (a wonderful supervisor).
Outside philosophy, I love Iyengar yoga and play squash. I cycle every day, once having ridden from the coast of Holland to Budapest via Berlin and last summer I cycled from Verdun to the Belgian coast following the Western Front of the First World War. I also used to get paid to sing.