Rate My Professor Bryan Roberts

Professor Bryan W. Roberts is Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has been on the faculty since 2013. He earned a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, with a dissertation titled Time, Symmetry and Structure: A Study in the Foundations of Quantum Theory, supervised by John Earman and John D. Norton. He also holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy, both from the University of Washington in 2005. Prior to joining LSE, Roberts served as Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California from 2012 to 2013. At LSE, he advanced from Assistant Professor (2013-2017) to Associate Professor (2017-present). He was Director of the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences from 2020 to 2024, Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge (2019-2020), and taught in the Part III programme at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (2019-2022). Since 2024, he has co-chaired the LSE Spectrum LGBTQIA+ staff network. Roberts received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2017, the Rob Clifton Memorial Book Prize in Philosophy of Physics in 2010, a Teaching Promotion Award from LSE in 2017, and a Student Union Excellence in Teaching Award from LSE in 2016. He is Principal Investigator on the European Research Council Consolidator Grant for the project Philosophical Foundations of the Edge of the Universe, awarded in 2024.

Roberts specializes in the philosophy of physics, with research interests in time reversal and the arrow of time, symmetry principles, quantum field theory, general relativity, thermo-statistical physics, black hole entropy, observables, and boundary conditions in the universe. His major publications include the monograph Reversing the Arrow of Time (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which presents a theory of symmetry, time, and time's arrow; the open access eBook Philosophico-Scientific Adventures (2018); and peer-reviewed articles such as Observables, Disassembled (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2018), Three Myths about Time Reversal in Quantum Theory (Philosophy of Science, 2017), Curie's Hazard: From Electromagnetism to Symmetry Violation (Erkenntnis, 2016), and The Gauge Argument: A Noether Reason (with Henrique Gomes and Jeremy Butterfield, 2022). He has supervised PhD theses on topics including Hawking radiation, particles in quantum field theory, and economic design. Roberts contributes to open access initiatives, co-founding BSPS Open and the Philosophy of Physics Society journal, and has developed LSE courses such as Einstein for Everyone and Physics and Uncertainty.