{"id":285,"date":"2005-10-25T18:07:43","date_gmt":"2005-10-25T22:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=285"},"modified":"2005-11-28T17:12:18","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T22:12:18","slug":"atiyah-talk-at-santa-barbara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=285","title":{"rendered":"Atiyah Talk at Santa Barbara"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sir Michael Atiyah is here in the United States this month.  Evidently he was at the Institute in Princeton last week during the Deligne conference, talking to Witten.  Last Friday he gave a public talk at an AMS conference at the University of Nebraska on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.unl.edu\/~swiegand1\/Atiyah-AMSPoster-2005.pdf\">The Nature of Space<\/a>,  and will be giving another one tomorrow in Santa Barbara on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kitp.ucsb.edu\/activities\/public\/atiyah05\/Oct05publecture.pdf\">same topic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday at the KITP he gave a talk on his own very speculative ideas about physics entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/online.kitp.ucsb.edu\/online\/strings05\/atiyah\/\">Does the Universe Have a Memory?<\/a>.   He began by subtitling his talk &#8220;Crazy thoughts of an old man&#8221;, and noting that when he was at the Institute Witten had listened to him politely and then after a micro-second given him four reasons why his ideas wouldn&#8217;t work.  One motivation he gave was that the current situation of string theory was somehow like Ptolemaic epicycles, with a fundamental idea that would drastically simplify everything still missing.<\/p>\n<p>The speculative idea he was promoting was that perhaps quantum mechanics should be changed so that the future depends not just on the present, but on the history of the system during some short period before the present.  So dynamics would be somewhat non-local in time.  He hopes for some connection to the Connes version of the standard model, but this was all very vague.  All in all, I fear that I wish Atiyah would go back to working on the relation between K-theory and physics&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b> In a comment Doug provides a <a href=\"http:\/\/online.itp.ucsb.edu\/online\/plecture\/atiyah\/\">link to Atiyah&#8217;s public lecture<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sir Michael Atiyah is here in the United States this month. Evidently he was at the Institute in Princeton last week during the Deligne conference, talking to Witten. Last Friday he gave a public talk at an AMS conference at &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=285\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"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\/285","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=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}