Hi, I’m Alex!

I’m Alexander Niederklapfer and was born in Linz, Austria, where I grew up and also finished my first studies, a Bachelor in Technical Mathematics. Afterwards, I moved to Munich, studied General and Indoeuropean Linguistics (a Bachelor including a minor in Philosophy) and finally started my journey into the Philosophy of Science with a Master degree at the MCMP. Since then I moved to London to pursue my doctoral studies in Philosophy of Physics at the LSE.

Besides my academic life, I started very young with making movies for which my friends and I were first recognised with a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2006.

My strong interests in all things Computers finds its expression in many unfinished hobby programming projects, and, most notably, in me having been working as a Cloud Architect for several years now, both full-time and part-time.

If that’s not enough yet, I am a passionate photographer, mostly capturing the wonders of the world when I travel. I am thinking of showing them off around here too!

I am currently a PhD student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where my research interest lies in the Philosophy of Science. In Particular, I mainly work in Philosophy of Physics, and my doctoral research evolves around metaphysical and epistemological questions of particle physics—all motivated by the main question “What, actually, is an (elementary) particle?”

Every now and then I also venture into other fields, most recently into Philosophy of AI where I am interested in the notion of what it means that natural language processing models (like the LLMs underpinning ChatGPT and others) understand language. What does it even mean for us humans to understand language?

Talks

Here is a selection of talks I have recently given or am about to give. If you are curious, the web-based presentations all use reveal.js.

Upcoming

• Annual Conference of the BSPS in Glasgow (UK), 15-17 July 2025

Past

• Foundations of Physics Conference in Gdańsk (PL), June 30-2 July 2025. Slides.
• Invited talk at the History and Philosophy of Science Research Seminar in Bonn, June 24th 2025. Slides.
• Annual meeting of the DPG in Bonn, 9-14 March 2025. Slides.
• Poster presentation at the Philosophy of AI Summer School by the University of London in Paris, 1-5 July 2025. Poster.
• Physics and Reality Conference in Helsinki, 4-6 June 2024.
• Annual meeting of the DPG in Berlin, 17-22 March 2024. Slides

Paper drafts

Here is some of my work in progress:

What is Fundamental in Fundamental Physics?

Can Particle Physics provide an account of the most fundamental building blocks of material reality? I think that it, at least, is more complicated than many might think. In particular, I argue that there are multiple ways how to decompose a quantum system, which lead to multiple, different, accounts of a hierarchy of fundamentality.

Preprint at PhilSciArchive

Localisation of Particles in Quantum Field Theory

While experiments in particle physics heavily invoke the concept of a particle, the theory behind this, quantum field theory, is quite explicitly not about particles. There are several approaches how to bring these two together, and I introduce one that has, thus far, received less attention in the philosophy literature.

Teaching

I taught classes for two courses at the LSE as a GTA (Graduate teaching assistant): Logic in the autumn term 2022 and Philosophy of Science in the autumn and winter term 2023/24.

Some years ago, I also taught a tutorial class at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) in Functional Analysis I in the Summer Term 2015.

I have several years of experience as a Cloud Architect, mostly focusing on the Microsoft Ecosystem (that is, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and related services), but I also designed and implemented some vendor-agnostic Kubernetes applications. Most recently, I worked at XIBIX Solutions, a fantastic company that provides consulting and implementation solutions for all things Cloud! I also developed some applications, and still do this as a hobby—my language of choice for this is C#.

Starting at an early age of 11 with a group of closest friends, I shot several short films, many of which won several awards and prizes. You can find out more about this on the homepage of Krmpf Krmpf Studios, the slightly hard to pronounce name we gave ourselves. Most notably, we won the Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for our very first short film, Abenteuer-Arbeitsweg, a stop motion film made with lego—back then, we added to the growth in popularity of this type of films, also called brickfilms.

Our latest project finished in 2018 and was quite monumentous in several aspects: the team that contributed to the film consisted of almost 80 people and featured a collaboration with composer Miguel Kertsman and some of his students at the University Krems. We also used a whole new technique for storytelling, which we called stereonarrativity. It uses the existing technology of stereoscopic movies (a.k.a. 3D movies) to simultaneously project two different image streams onto the screen. The audience members wear glasses similar to the 3D case, but the glasses actually determine which of the two image streams they can see. Different people in the same cinema room will see different movies! Here’s an interview with me that goes into more details on this. You can have a look at the trailer (in German) here.