Claus Kiefer studied physics and astronomy at the Universities of Heidelberg and Vienna. He earned his PhD from Heidelberg University in 1988 under the supervision of H.-Dieter Zeh. He has held positions at the Universities of Heidelberg, Zurich, and Freiburg, and is a professor at the University of Cologne since 2001. His main interests are quantum gravity, cosmology, black holes, and the foundations of quantum theory. He has published several books including the monograph “Quantum Gravity” (third edition: Oxford 2012). He is a member of The Foundational Questions Institute, USA, since 2006.

Valia Allori has studied physics and philosophy first in Italy, her home country, and then in the United States. She is currently Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Northern Illinois University where she works in the foundations of physics, with special focus on quantum mechanics. Her main concern has always been to understand what the world is really like, and how we can use our best physical theory to answer such general metaphysical questions. In her physics doctoral dissertation from University of Genova (Italy), she discussed the classical limit of quantum mechanics, to analyze the connections between the quantum and the classical theories. What does it mean that a theory, in a certain approximation, reduces to another? Is the classical explanation of macroscopic phenomena essentially different from the one provided by quantum mechanics? In her philosophy doctoral dissertation from Rutgers she turned to more general questions that involve the structure of fundamental physical theories, the metaphysical status and the epistemological role of the theoretical entities used in these theories. Do all fundamental physical theories have the very same structure, contrarily to what one might think? If so, what is this telling us about the nature of explanation?