Split Summer School in Physics and Philosophy
Professor Franjo Sokolić is a professor of quantum mechanics, special relativity, quantum mechanics of molecules, history of physics, etc., at the University of Split. And one of the rare physicists interested in foundational questions. I was lucky that he was a professor to me during my Bachelor studies. He made my life in Split happier.
He was also brave enough to start the Conference on Foundations of Physics in 2012. It was only a one-day conference but it was the beginning of something beautiful. Because I was a Sokolić student, and, I dare to say, friend, I tried to help the best I could – by promoting this event. I remember that I created some simple posters, and printed them at my cost (to put this in context: I had a budget only for food, so it was either food or posters and the decision was obvious – everything for foundations!), and I went from faculty to faculty to glue this posters on walls and tables. I even put them in some public spaces (like bus stations).
The star of the 2012 conference was world-renowned philosopher of science, Tim Maudlin. He accepted to be there because.. well, to be honest, I have no idea. I only know he was spending summer in Hvar (an island near Split) and that Sokolić is so friendly that, sometimes, it is hard to resist when he asks you something! Anyhow, we all enjoyed Tim’s lecture about topology.
The main organizers were, together with Sokolić, Professor Dragan Poljak (I was lucky to have him as a professor of Electromagnetism), and Professor Berislav Žarnić. Professor Žarnić deserves a special page. I was following his lectures on Philosophy of Science, where we have been learning, well, everything: from metaphysics and history of science to logic and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (yes, it was my exam question!). He was extremely friendly and supportive of his students. Even when I would say something stupid (and I often said something stupid), he would always comment: “Well, there is something in that sentence worth thinking about”. At the same time, he really understood foundational problems in physics, which is very rare to see in the philosophical community in Croatia. Unfortunately, he died in 2017 and I will be missing him, basically, until I die. With his death, for me, the philosophy of science in Split died too.
Next year, in 2013, I was a lecturer at the conference and I presented the time-arrival problem within the framework of Bohmian mechanics, which I had researched at LMU in Munich. My mentor Detlef Dürr (another extremely intelligent mathematical physicist who will be remembered in the history of science as a person who formally developed non-relativistic quantum mechanics with elegant mathematics, and very kind toward his students at the same time + he is a musician!) was also there I really enjoyed it a lot. There was a lot of Bohmian mechanics at this two-days conference.
In 2014 I was a member of the organizing committee (the first and last time, because after that I left Split and Croatia for good) and we had a lovely conference too. Later, for years, Sokolić, Poljak, and Žarnić (with his students) were constantly organizing this conference. They really worked a lot and the product of their work can be seen on the official pages of the School (yeah, very interesting lectures).
In 2017 Tim Maudlin jumped in and started helping in the organization.
Last year I volunteered to help, again, a little bit with PR. So I informed some scientific journalists about the conference and I created a Facebook page for Split Summer School in Physics and Philosophy (s3p2). eah, you are right, the small conference became a large school in the meantime, with a lot of international students attending it. With a very lovely cover (if you put courser on it, you can read the description):
But Tim Maudlin, who became the main organizer in the meantime, had an even better idea: he decided to create the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.
It all started with the 2012 one-day conference and now it is growing into a very respectable international school on foundations of physics and the Institute for the Foundations of Physics.
Miracles happen.