Owen Jack Ernest Maroney PhD U of London (2002)
	Phone:	(519) 569-7600 x6601
	Email:	o.maroney[at]usyd.edu.au

---

Graduated from Churchill College, Cambridge 1991. I wasn't very inspired by my degree, didn't get a good result, and so couldn't get any funding to do post-graduate research. As a result I had to get a job.

Employed as a transport planner for London Transport, 1992-1997. Employed as a housing researcher for National Housing Federation 1998-1999. It was an interesting experience doing research for social and government policy and to see at first hand the data gathering and model building that lay behind the decisions on how to spend billions of dollars of money.

Masters degree at Birkbeck College, London, 1993-1995. Nuclear and Particle Physics. PhD at Birkbeck College, London, 1996-2002. Theoretical physics. This was done part-time, funded by the jobs I did. When I applied to do the MSc, it was soon after announced that this would be the last MSc course offered by the physics department. One year into the PhD, it was announced the physics department would be shut down as it wasn't making a profit.

During my PhD I was surprised to realise that the transport demand modelling I had done for London Transport was more relevant to the areas of statistical mechanics I was studying than the thermodynamics I learned at university.

Post-doc in High Energy Physics at Bristol University. 2002-2004. Post-doc in High Energy Physics at Imperial College London, 2004-2005. Working on the Grid computing project for the LHC experiment. Seeing a big science project like the LHC from the inside made an interesting contrast to the experinces I had seen of funding for areas such as foundations of physics.

Affiliations

Associate Research Fellow, Birkbeck College London.Foundations of quantum theory. The interpretation of quantum theory through realist models. Although it is known that realist, hidden variable interpretations of quantum theory exist, it is far from well known what range of such theories is possible. Even the simplest question: 'Does a valid de Broglie-Bohm interpretation exist with momentum as the beable?' does not seem to have a definitive answer. Why are certain symmetries of the quantum level of description inevitably violated by hidden variable theories, but other symmetries not? Do all beables provide a solution to the measurement problem and if not, why not? Which beables make viable candidates for realistic descriptions and which do not? What are the criteria for discriminating between such pictures? The answers to such questions may be of assistance for moving beyond the interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics to developing realist models of interacting field theories, thermal field theories and quantum gravity.

Foundations of statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics has, despite a classical underpinning, surprisingly similar interpretational difficultes to quantum mechanics. There are problems of principle, such as whether the thermodynamic limit actually exists, or whether and to what extent it is possible to derive phenomenological thermodynamic results without presupposing the existence of systems that are not to be described in terms of statistical mechanics (such as heat baths and work reservoirs). There are also problems of subjectivity and information, as epitomised by many discussions of the Maxwell's Demon problem: is entropy a property of individual systems, of our state of knowledge of a system or of some other mode of description?

The relationship between statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Is it possible that resolutions to problems in quantum theory can have implications for statistical mechanics? On a simplistic level, it is often suggested that wavefunction collapse may be related to thermodynamic irreversibility. If the wavefunction collapse is - as is usual - a Markov process this cannot be the case, but more general models of collapse may incorporate a more time-asymmetric dynamics. The representation of quantum systems by a density matrix, whether as a reduced density matrix of an entangled system, or as a fundamental description of an individual system, may also have a significance for the foundations of statistical mechanics.

I take an unashamedly realist position, that physics should describe processes that are independant of whether there are observers, scientists or rational agents to observe, measure or gamble on the outcomes. While there must exist processes within physics that can be described as measurements, observers, and so forth, and these processes should be such as to reproduce an image of the world as we perceive it, such processes should not depend upon the pre-existence of notions of measurement, observers and so forth. While the processes that can be characterised as observers may (and sometimes must) participate in and affect the processes they observe, as well as being affected by such processes, the nature of this participation should be describable by the same kind of physical processes that occur when there are no observers present.

Recent Publications: Does a Computer have an Arrow of Time?, O. J. E. Maroney, 0709.3131, 2007-09-20 Generalising Landauer's Principle, O. J. E. Maroney, quant-ph/0702094, 2007-02-09 The Physical Basis of the Gibbs-von Neumann entropy, O. J. E. Maroney, quant-ph/0701127, 2007-01-17 Information and Entropy in Quantum Theory, O. J. E. Maroney, quant-ph/0411172, 2004-11-23 Are all reversible computations tidy?, O. J. E. Maroney, quant-ph/0403079, 2004-03-10 The density matrix in the de Broglie-Bohm approach, O. J. E. Maroney, Foundations of Physics Vol 35 no 3 pp. 493-510 (2005), quant-ph/0311149, 2003-11-21 Quantum trajectories, real, surreal or an approximation to a deeper process?, B. J. Hiley, R.E Callaghan, O. Maroney , University of London), quant-ph/0010020, 2000-10-05 Consistent Histories and the Bohm Approach, O. J. E. Maroney, B. J. Hiley, University of London), quant-ph/0009056, 2000-09-13