Descartes Centre Colloquium with Anastasiia Lazutkina and Philip Goyal

Foundations of physics from quantum mechanics to cosmology

Utrecht University has a long and rich tradition in history, philosophy & foundations of physics. The local researchers in this field are all members of the university-wide Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. We are particularly pleased to welcome Descartes fellows Anastasiia Lazutkina and Philip Goyal to our community!

Part of the lasting appeal of foundations of physics is that it covers a dazzling, almost magical, range of scale from the tiniest particles to the entire cosmos. The two lectures today are about our theorizing in these areas, specifically about how galaxies function as evidence in cosmology, and about how we can improve existing methodologies concerning the interpretation of quantum theory. 

Anastasiia Lazutkina, Evidence in Cosmology: How and Why Galaxies Became Complicated

It is a widely accepted view in the philosophy of science that what counts as evidence for a theory depends on the theory itself. However, the question of how a theory selects its evidential base remains largely underexplored. In this talk I address this gap by analyzing a case study in cosmology: the evolving role of galaxies as evidence for cosmological models, particularly those involving dark matter, from the 1970s until now. While galaxies were central for testing and constructing cosmological models, they have, over time, lost their status as decisive evidence. This shift raises questions: Why and how did this happen? What criteria determine whether galaxies count as evidence for particular phenomena and our theories of them?

I trace the role of galaxies, showing how galactic phenomena provided data for constructing cosmological scenarios of structure formation in the 1970s–1980s. Since then, advances in the precision, depth, and scope of galaxy observations have been remarkable, but the current standard cosmological model, Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), struggles to account for them.

Despite these challenges, the cosmological community largely does not interpret galactic discrepancies as evidence against ΛCDM (De Baerdemaeker & Boyd 2020). Instead, galaxies are considered “too complicated” to provide clean tests of the model. This attitude marks a shift: galaxies, once crucial, are now often dismissed as unreliable sources of evidence. I ask: How did galaxies become “too complicated”? What changed in the epistemic practices of cosmology to account for this shift?

To address these questions, I employ Curiel’s (2025, forthcoming) framework grounded on the idea of epistemic control: an understanding of how a theory connects with empirical data, including its regime of applicability and conditions under which its formalism can be considered physically meaningful. I argue that the loss of epistemic control at galactic scales, due to the complex, multiscale nature of baryonic physics, has rendered galaxies epistemically unreliable within the ΛCDM framework.

Philip Goyal, Systematizing the Interpretation of Quantum Theory: An Operational Reconstructive Approach

For a century, quantum theory has posed a fundamental challenge to philosophical thinking. On its face, it repudiates many of the key features of the mechanical conception of physical reality. However, the challenge of developing a precise, coherent alternative to that conception has yet to be met. 

In this talk, I argue that a major hindrance to the project of quantum interpretation lies in its existing interpretative methodologies, which suffer from a lack of systematicity in their judgements about what aspects of the theory are interpretational relevant.  In particular, I argue that current interpretations (i) tend to marginalize the informal part of the theory in favor of its formal part; (ii) place inappropriate emphasis on the natural language component of the formalism over its detailed mathematical structure; and (iii) offers little protection against implicit projection of pre-existing metaphysical assumptions.

Here I describe an operational reconstructive interpretative methodology, which harnesses the recent results of the quantum reconstruction program.  I argue that this methodology provides a powerful means to identify almost all facts that could be interpretationally relevant and protects against projection of implicit metaphysics.  Moreover, I argue that the quantum reconstruction program offers a powerful way to discover new physical principles, and offers a systematic pathway to build a rich, coherent conception of quantum reality.

Short biographies
Anastasiia Lazutkina is a PhD student at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in DFG Research Training Group 2696, based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies. She is also an external collaborator with the Stellar Populations and Dynamics Research Group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bonn. Her research is in the history and philosophy of science, with a particular focus on cosmology.

Philip Goyal is an Associate Professor at the University at Albany (SUNY).  Trained as a theoretical physicist, his research centers on the foundations of quantum theory.  Since the early 2000s, he has been engaged with the quantum reconstruction program, whose goal is to systematically derive the mathematical formalism of quantum theory from physically transparent principles formulated in an operational framework.  In his work, the informational perspective on physical reality has been a particular inspiration, with Bayesian inference, information theory, and functional equations the primary tools.  This work has resulted in reconstructions of the core (Dirac–von Neumann) quantum formalism, as well as reconstructions of the classical-quantum correspondence rules and the identical particle formalism.