The causal set approach to quantum gravity Seminar
- Time:
- 12:00
- Date:
- 3 October 2013
- Venue:
- Room 5A Building 54 Highfield Campus University of Southampton SO17 1BJ
Event details
A Gravity Series seminar
The causal set approach to quantum gravity is based on the hypothesis that the fundamental degrees of freedom in quantum gravity are discrete causal relations. I will explain how this discreteness unifies the spacetime manifold with its geometry -- in contrast to continuum spacetime in which the manifold has to have its geometry imposed ``from outside''. I will give an overview of the approach, explain that it is the only approach to quantum gravity that has made an observable prediction that was verified after the fact and mention some recent progress in defining an action for a causal set.
Speaker information
Fay Dowker , Imperial College London. Fay Dowker is a British theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. As a student, she was interested in wormholes and quantum cosmology. Having studied at the University of Cambridge, Dowker was awarded the Tyson Medal in 1987 and completed her Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Stephen Hawking in 1990. She was later a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, at the University of California at Santa Barbara and also the California Institute of Technology. She is currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics and a member of the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London and an Affiliate of the Institute for Quantum Computing. She conducts research in a number of areas of theoretical physics including quantum gravity and causal set theory. Dowker was previously a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.