A Tale of Emergence
A Tale of Emergence
- Event time: 1:00pm until 2:00pm
- Event date: 23rd April 2024
- Speaker: Guilherme Franzmann (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA))
- Location: Higgs Centre Seminar Room, Room 4305, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) (James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB)) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
The question of what fundamentally is has never been straightforward in physics, yet there had always been a tentative answer for both theoretical and practical purposes. Everything shifted about a century ago with the advent of quantum mechanics, which challenged our traditional understanding of existence as suddenly we can also talk about things that are in quantum space*, not only in classical spacetime anymore. Nonetheless, were we to keep a strong reductionist position, then we would be left with no choice but to understand how classical spatiotemporal existence can emerge from the quantum mechanical one. This talk aims to be a pedagogical introduction to this discussion, and its implications for contemporaries' approaches to quantizing gravity. Technical details will be mostly committed, but we will do a deep dive into some of the conceptual underpinnings of fundamental physics.
*Known as Hilbert space.
Event resources
About Higgs Centre colloquia
The Higgs Centre Colloquia are a fortnightly series of talks aimed at a wide-range of topical Theoretical Physics issues..