I'm interested in the most fundamental of questions about the nature and origin of the Universe, particularly how general relativity and quantum mechanics can be unified into a single framework of quantum gravity. This hundred-year old problem has driven us to radically rethink the very concepts of space, time and possibility that form the basis of our conception of reality.
My research focuses on epistemological problems related to space, time and symmetry. My work can be divided in two strands: a proposal for retaining time in quantum gravity and an investigation into the role of scale in quantum cosmology. The first strand has resulted in a recent book with Karim Thébault and a series of papers where we develop a way to retain time in quantum cosmology while eliminating quantum singularities.
The second strand is part of the Shape Dynamics research programme, which is a scale-free and empirically adequate description of gravity. In a recent PhD thesis, I developed a framework for identifying (possibly hidden) gauge symmetries, then used this to eliminate global scale from cosmology. The result is a new way of accounting for the Arrow of Time in our Universe.
See a list of selected works below.