James Brian Pitts
Assistant Teaching Professor
Research Interests
Professor Pitts’ research interests span various questions invloving science at the interface of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. These questions include:
- Paradoxes involving energy conservation in General Relativity, and apparently missing change when General Relativity is merged with quantum mechanics.
- Derivations of theories of gravity (including massive gravity theories) from particle physics principles.
- Techniques for including 'spinor' fields, along with gravity in a unified and economical way.
- The issue of conservation of energy and momentum in relation to mental causation.
- The tendency for scientific data to underdetermine theories in quantitative sciences.
- The issue of inductive inference.
- The relation between scientific and extra-scientific beliefs.
Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Pitts was an Assistant Professor at Zayed University. He was awarded a Presidential Scholarship during his time as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy and a Research Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Notre Dame. He later held a Postdoctoral Fellowship and served as a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, during which he was awarded three competitive research grants as Principal Investigator.
Professor Pitts has also held positions including Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln (UK). His interdisciplinary background bridges philosophy and physics, with ongoing work at the intersection of the two fields.
- Research Fellow and Senior Research Associate, University of Cambridge, England
- Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Notre Dame, USA
- Ph.D. in Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
- Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science (Philosophy concentration), University of Notre Dame, USA
- M.Sc. in Financial Engineering, WorldQuant University, USA
- PI, “Scholars Award: Observables in Hamiltonian Dynamics,” National Science Foundation (USA), Science, Technology and Society.
- Awarded the inaugural 2020 Mind-Matter Prize for best paper in the journal Mind and Matter, 2017-19.