Fay Dowker
Department of Physics, Imperial College (Londres, Royaume-Uni)
Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
|
| « À la recherche du temps perdu... in quantum gravity » |
|
Fay Dowker |
| General Relativity teaches us that the physical world has a 4-dimensional character and cannot be understood as something 3-dimensional like ‘space with things in it’ evolving in time. Many physicists have concluded that this means that the physical world is a 4-d ‘Block Universe’ in which all past, present and future events have the same physical status and exist together “timelessly”. This sets up a tension with the dynamic quality of our sense-experience of the passage of time which does not co-ordinate with anything in a Block Universe. I will argue that an approach to the problem of quantum gravity in which spacetime is fundamentally discrete -- called ‘causal set theory' -- gives a new perspective on the ancient dichotomy of Being vs Becoming and allows for a model of the world which respects General Relativity's lack of a global time but within which the passage of time is physical. |
|
vendredi 20 juin 2014 - 11:00 Amphithéâtre Henri Mineur, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris |
| Page web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage |