Jill North

I am a professor in the philosophy department at Rutgers, where I completed my PhD. I specialize in philosophy of physics. I also have interests in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics.

I have written on a variety of topics in the foundations of physics, including the direction of time, physical probability, spacetime ontology, theoretical equivalence, and the nature and use of mathematical structures in physics. Lately I have been working on a project on complex numbers in quantum mechanics.

Before coming to Rutgers, I was an associate professor in the philosophy department at Cornell. Before that, I was an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Yale, where I had studied physics and philosophy as an undergraduate. And before that, I was a Bersoff fellow in the philosophy department at NYU.

Together with Elisabeth Camp and Elizabeth Harman, I am the co-founder and co-organizer of the workshop series Athena in Action: A Networking and Mentoring Workshop for Graduate Student Women in Philosophy.

• On Perspicuous Representation in Physics
• Paving the Way for a Middle Way on Theoretical Equivalence
• Formulations of Classical Mechanics
• A New Approach to the Relational-Substantival Debate
• The Structure of a Quantum World
• Time in Thermodynamics
• An Empirical Approach to Symmetry and Probability
• The “Structure” of Physics: A Case Study
• Two Views on Time Reversal
• Understanding the Time-Asymmetry of Radiation
• What is the Problem about the Time-Asymmetry of Thermodynamics?: A Reply to Price

• Losing an i: On the Naturalness of Complex Numbers for Quantum Mechanics
• The Complex Structure of Quantum Mechanics
• Mathematical Structures in Physics: The Curious Case of the Complex Numbers

• Gordon Belot, Geometric Possibility
• Mathias Frisch, Consistency, Asymmetry and Non-Locality: A Philosophical Investigation of Classical Electrodynamics
• Max Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity: From Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond