Siddharth Muthukrishnan

About

I am a Fellow at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. Previously, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh and I did a PhD at the same department (both supervised by David Wallace). I primarily work in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. I'm also interested in early modern philosophy (especially Newton and Descartes) and epistemology. Before entering philosophy, I did a PhD in quantum computing theory.

Education and Experience

Fellow, Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University (2025-).
Postdoctoral Scholar, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (2024-2025) Postdoc supervisor: David Wallace.
PhD, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (2019-2025). Dissertation chair: David Wallace. [All work completed by 2024, defended in 2025.]
PhD Student, Philosophy, University of Southern California (2018-2019). [Transferred to Pitt HPS along with David Wallace.]
PhD, Physics, University of Southern California (2018). Dissertation chair: Daniel Lidar.
Research Assistant, Computer Science, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India (2010-2011).
BTech, Engineering Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India (2010).

Publications

Forthcoming

"Many Worlds as Anti-Conspiracy Theory: Locally and causally explaining a quantum world without finetuning", in Alyssa Ney (Ed.). Local Quantum Mechanics: Everett, Many Worlds, and Reality (New York: Oxford University Press). [pdf] [Preprint available at PhilSci Archive:24171]
"Unpacking Black Hole Complementarity" in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. [pdf] [Preprint available at PhilSci Archive:22594]
An accessible summary of this paper titled "Black Holes and Reality" is published in BJPS Short Reads [pdf]

Physics

Muthukrishnan, Albash, Lidar, “Sensitivity of quantum speedup by quantum annealing to a noisy oracle”, Physical Review A 2019
Muthukrishnan, Lidar, “Quasiadiabatic Grover search via the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximation”, Physical Review A 2017
Muthukrishnan, Albash, and Lidar, “Tunneling and speedup in quantum optimization for permutation-symmetric problems”, Physical Review X 2016
Das, Sharma, and Muthukrishnan, “On Some Special Cases of the Entropy Photon-Number Inequality”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2012
Sharma, Das, and Muthukrishnan, “Entropy power inequality for a family of discrete random variables”, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2011

Works in progress

Drafts available on request.

Grace Under Pressure: Vagueness and Fault-Tolerance [pdf]
On the relation between Unruh and Hawking radiation (with Ignacio J. Araya)
The Scientific and the Zetetic
Epistemicism vs. Physics
Anti-Cartesianism in Newton's Third Rule
How far did Aristotle get with his theory of chance?

Teaching

I was the instructor of record of the following courses at the University of Pittsburgh.

Philosophy of 20th Century Physics [syllabus]
Science-Fiction and Philosophy [syllabus]
Morality and Medicine [syllabus]