16-20 June 2025, Zurich, Switzerland.
Solstice of Foundations 2025 was a summer school on quantum foundations hosted by the University of Zürich and Squids. It provided a solid introduction to current approaches and problems within foundational research, and is tailored for junior researchers entering the field, like masters and PhD students, as well as postdocs.
The 2025 edition focused on the importance of agents, relativity and correlations in quantum foundations. This includes quantum reference frames, modelling observers as explicit physical systems, the motility of the Heisenberg cut, multi-agent paradoxes, and the role of the observer and boundaries in novel approaches to relativity and quantum gravity.
The schedule, videos and lecture notes of the summer school are available through the school’s website (navigate through to the 2025 edition if you’re reading this from the far future, and there’s a fresher edition).
Lectures
- Exploring the foundations of physics, by Robert Spekkens [slides]
- A resource-theoretical approach to non-classicality, by David Schmid [slides]
- Modelling agents in quantum theory and beyond, by Renato Renner [slides of a similar talk]
- Multi-agent paradoxes, by Yìlè Yīng [slides for lecture 1] [slides for lecture 2]
- Quantum reference frames, by Flaminia Giacomini [lecture notes for lectures 1-2]
- Non-ideal quantum reference frames, by Anne-Catherine de la Hamette [lecture notes for lecture 1]
- Generalization of the equivalence principle to quantum reference frames, by Flaminia Giacomini [slides for lecture 3]
- From quantum information to spacetime, by Anne-Catherine de la Hamette [slides for lectures 2-3]
- Introduction to quantum gravity, by Daniele Oriti [slides]
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