Philosophy of Cosmology Essay Contest Winner (2020)

Our Philosophy of Cosmology essay contest is officially closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted an essay, it was a pleasure getting to read each and every one. The selection process was not easy, but in the end one essay stood out the most.

Congratulations to our winner Niels Martens!


Niels Martens

Congratulations to Niels Martens whose essay “Dark Matter Realism” earned him the winning title!

Niels Martens is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy of physics within the interdisciplinary research unit “Epistemology of the LHC”. He is a member of the Lichtenberg Group for History and Philosophy of Physics (University of Bonn, Germany) and the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology (RWTH Aachen University, Germany). In 2017, he obtained a DPhil in Philosophy from Magdalen College (Oxford University, UK) for a dissertation on mass scalings. His work focuses on dark matter and modified gravity, the conceptual distinction between spacetime and matter, and symmetries.