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Jill North
Jill North is an Associate Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University,. Her research is primarily in philosophy of physics, and also in philosophy of science and metaphysics. North is known for her work on the direction of time and on structure in physics. She is the area co-editor (with Christian Wüthrich) for philosophy of physics for the philosophy journal Ergo.

Education and Career
North earned her BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale University in 1997 and her PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University in 2004. In 1998 North received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and in 2003 she received the American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship. From 2004-2006 she was a Bersoff Fellow in the Philosophy Department at NYU. She worked at Yale University for five years and then accepted a tenured position at Cornell, where she works now. Brian Leiter called the move to Cornell a “significant hire” for the Philosophy department. Before graduate school she taught high school physics and math for a year.

In addition to her research and teaching, North has worked on improving the participation of women in academic philosophy. She is the co-organizer (with Elisabeth Camp and Elizabeth Harman) for a Networking and Mentoring Workshop for Graduate Student Women in Philosophy, a recurring series of workshops, the first of which will occur this summer at Princeton. She is a member of the Women’s Caucus of the Philosophy of Science Association.

In graduate school North studied under David Albert at Columbia and Barry Loewer and Tim Maudlin at Rutgers. North is married to the philosopher Theodore Sider. She is the daughter of the poet Charles North and the painter Paula North.

Research Areas
North is known for her work on the direction of time and on structure in physics. In the area of the direction of time, she defends the Past Hypothesis solution to the problem of explaining the asymmetry of thermodynamics and other asymmetries in time, such as the asymmetry of radiation. In the area of structure in physics, she defends a controversial thesis she calls “structural realism”: that we should be realists about the structure of our best physical theories. (This should not be confused with a different view in philosophy of science that goes by the same name, which proponents use to defuse the pessimistic meta-induction:. ) She argues that we should, all things being equal, prefer theories that contain less structure. She defends these theses in relation to classical mechanics in particular, arguing that different formulations of classical mechanics (such as the Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, and Newtonian formulations) are not genuinely equivalent, since they differ in structure. She extends these ideas to related issues in quantum mechanics and spacetime physics. For instance, she defends a version of “wavefunction realism,” the view that the wavefunction of quantum mechanics is a real physical thing—a field in a physical space. A variation on the structural realism thesis leads to her current project, which is to propose a new way of understanding the spacetime ontology debate: not as the traditional question of whether spacetime exists, but rather as the question of whether spacetime structure is fundamental.

Selected publications
“The Structure of a Quantum World” (2013), The Wave Function: Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, eds. David Albert and Alyssa Ney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 184–202.

“The ‘Structure’ of Physics: A Case Study” (2009), Journal of Philosophy 106, 57–88.

“Understanding the Time-Asymmetry of Radiation” (2003), Philosophy of Science (Proceedings) 70, 1086–1097.