Franklin & Seifert Win 2024 Popper Prize
Alexander Franklin (KCL) and Vanessa Seifert (Bristol) are the winners of the 2024 Popper Prize.
Alexander Franklin and Vanessa Seifert
The Popper Prize, awarded by the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, is awarded annually for the best article appearing in the journal in the preceding year.
Franklin and Seifert were awarded the prize for their article, “The Problem of Molecular Structure Just Is the Measurement Problem“.
The editors-in-chief of the journal, Tim Lewens (Cambridge) and Robert Rupert (Colorado), write:
In ‘The Problem of Molecular Structure Just Is the Measurement Problem’, Franklin and Seifert argue that three foundational problems arising within quantum-mechanical explanations of chemical structure—chirality, the existence of isomers, and symmetry breaking—can be treated as aspects of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. The authors contend that these results reduce the support these problems provide for anti-reductionist and emergentist positions. Although the measurement problem is unsolved, Franklin and Seifert explore how leading proposed solutions can address the foundational problems at issue.
This piece represents a ground-breaking unification of work in the foundations of physics and in the foundations of chemistry, thereby carving out new territory where these areas of enquiry overlap. It is a superb contribution to the philosophy of science, both in its detailed treatment of problems to do with molecular structure and in the way this treatment is brought to bear on the long-running debate over the emergent status of chemical phenomena. The editors applaud Franklin and Seifert’s careful, insightful, and agenda-setting research, enthusiastically awarding them the 2024 Popper Prize.
The prize includes a £500 award to the winner(s).
Honorable mentions went to Toby Friend (Buffalo) for “How to Be Humean about Symmetries” and Marco Martinez (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) and David Teira for “Why Experimental Balance Is Still a Reason to Randomize“.
More information about the prize, including a list of past winners, is here.
Congratulations, Vanessa and Alexander.
This was an excellent paper: a good choice by BJPS’s editors.
(Though it was accepted for publication back in 2020; the editors really need to do something about BJPS’s publication backlog!)
In fact, the paper was accepted in 2021. That’s still quite a delay but here’s why it happens (from the BJPS website):
“There will be a long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper prepared and in print. There has been a substantial increase in the number of submissions we have received in recent years. At the same time, our acceptance rate has remained fairly stable. Thus, there are many more papers that need to be carefully guided through the production process.
There are two ways to deal with this increase:
* Impose a substantial pause on accepting new papers. This option would particularly harm early-career philosophers of science, who have a limited number of suitable venues for their work and can’t afford to wait as long as later-career folks.
* Substantially increase the cost of the journal to cover the labour costs involved in publishing more pages per year. This option would particularly harm low-income readers and institutions.
Because a delay in production is closer to an inconvenience than a harm, we’ve chosen this path.
(…) We do aim to get your final draft online as soon as possible, usually within a few weeks. This means that your paper will be issued with a DOI, and should count as published for the purposes of your CV, hiring/promotion boards, grant committees, and so on.”
Link here: https://www.thebsps.org/faq/faq-final/#start
Alexander Franklin received the Popper Prize for a paper in which decoherence was supposed to explain the emergence of Everettian worlds.
Just as decoherence does not create worlds, success can be incoherent.
Link: https://philpapers.org/rec/REYDIN
We will read the prize-winning paper carefully and analytically. After all, we all love Popper.
Philip Rey