On May 28 we will have a seminar by
Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research)
Title: A Surprisingly Promising Approach to the Fundamental Theory of Physics
Abstract:
What might an ultimate rule for physics—below space, time, particles, etc.—be like? I had an idea about this 30 years ago, wrote about in 2002, and finally last fall decided to investigate it again … and to my great surprise realized that it actually looks as if it can work. It has no intrinsic notion of space or time, but just consists in repeatedly (like 10^400 times) applying a very simple rule to abstract collections of elements and relations which can be thought of as forming a hypergraph. With various assumptions the large-scale limit behaves like continuum space, shows Lorentz invariance, and reproduces the Einstein equations (including energy-momentum). Different rewritings of the hypergraph define a multiway system, whose large-scale limit reproduces quantum mechanics, and in particular the path integral. In the framework, general relativity and quantum mechanics are essentially the same theory, but applied to the spacetime causal graph as opposed to the multiway causal graph. I’ll talk about the structure of the theory, some of its potential predictions, and (insofar as I understand them) its apparently close connections with popular recent mathematical physics approaches.
Meeting information:
28th of May at 18:30 Italian Time
Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/198435430
You can watch the recording at
https://pandora.infn.it/public/28abf5