{"id":12492,"date":"2021-09-24T18:38:52","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T22:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12492"},"modified":"2021-09-28T12:26:37","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T16:26:37","slug":"visit-to-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12492","title":{"rendered":"Visit to Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent yesterday up in Providence, visiting the Theoretical Physics Center at Brown, and giving a talk there (slides are available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/twistorunification\/brown9-23-21.pdf\">here<\/a>, newer version of a paper <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/twistorunification\/euclidean-twistor-unification.pdf\">here<\/a>),  At some point a recording of the talk should appear online. In the talk I tried to emphasize some basic things which it took me a very long time to appreciate:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The ways in which Euclidean QFT is very different than Minkowski space-time QFT, in particular the necessity of having a distinguished imaginary time vector, breaking SO(4) invariance, in order to recover Lorentz (SL(2,C)) invariance.\n<\/li>\n<li>The way in which Minkowski space-time shows up when you do twistor theory in Euclidean space-time (see the pictures in the slides). This again makes clear the way SO(4) invariance is broken.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While I&#8217;m making a proposal for how to get gravity out of chiral 4d geometry, I&#8217;ve never been that expert in GR, and GR is the focus of much of the theory community these days, in particular the theorists at Brown.  So, they had lots of questions about what the implications of this are for GR that I couldn&#8217;t answer.  I&#8217;ll keep thinking more about this and may some day start to have answers (or maybe GR experts will find this proposal interesting enough to figure out the answers themselves).<\/p>\n<p>I was invited to give the talk by Stephon Alexander, and got to spend some time talking with him while in Providence.  He has worked in the past (see <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1212.5246\">here<\/a>) on ideas that bring together the gravitational and weak interactions in a similar way.  More recently he has been working on ideas for how one might observe an unexpected chiral component to the gravitational interactions, and now has a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brown.edu\/news\/2021-06-30\/alexander\">grant from the Simons Foundation<\/a> that will fund work in this area. Next week he&#8217;ll be here at Columbia giving an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.astro.columbia.edu\/event?eid=715\">astronomy colloquium on the topic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>He also has a new book (his first was <em>The Jazz of Physics<\/em>) out, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.basicbooks.com\/titles\/stephon-alexander\/fear-of-a-black-universe\/9781541699618\/\">Fear of a Black Universe: an Outsider&#8217;s Guide to the Future of Physics<\/a>. It&#8217;s quite interesting, with much of the earlier parts describing some of his experiences making a career for himself as a theorist, together with explanations of the physics background. The last part (in collaboration with Jaron Lanier) heads off in somewhat of a sci-fi direction, an excerpt is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/so-what-if-aliens-quantum-computers-explain-dark-energy\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A major theme of the book (with which I&#8217;m very sympathetic) is that the community doing this sort of theoretical physics desperately needs to get out of its current rut and open itself to new ideas, which often will come from &#8220;outsiders&#8221;.  One aspect of being an &#8220;outsider&#8221; that Alexander has experienced is difference in racial background, but he&#8217;s concerned with a more general context of hostility to ideas that aren&#8217;t those currently favored by &#8220;insiders&#8221;.  While he started out his career doing string theory, he has moved in different directions over the years.  He explains that as a postdoc at SLAC he invited Lee Smolin to come and lecture on loop quantum gravity, something which was not at all well received by the local string theorists.  While I&#8217;m quite interested for my own reasons to understand better what he has been doing with the physics of possible chiral effects in gravity, it was great to see his enthusiasm for and encouragement of ideas that don&#8217;t fit exactly into the narrow conception of the subject that now dominates all too much of the community doing fundamental theoretical physics.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong>  There&#8217;s video of the talk available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wNK_JxK0s9E&#038;t=1m55s\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent yesterday up in Providence, visiting the Theoretical Physics Center at Brown, and giving a talk there (slides are available here, newer version of a paper here), At some point a recording of the talk should appear online. In &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12492\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-twistor-unification"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12492"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12501,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12492\/revisions\/12501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}