Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Karim Thébault (8 January on Zoom)

On Friday, 8 January, Karim Thébault (University of Bristol) will give a talk entitled “Poincaré, dark energy, and the deadly robots of Krikkit: Solving the problem of time via superpositions of the cosmological constant” (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl.

The program for the winter semester can be found here, while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel.

Abstract:

Henri Poincaré, in a strangely neglected passage towards the end of his monumental essay on `Relative and Absolute Motion’ (Science and Hypothesis, 1905 Chapter 7), appeals to the idea of a planet entirely secluded from the rest of the universe by clouds to argue that ‘as long as nature has secrets’ the distinction between constants of nature and constants of motion will remain ‘highly arbitrary and always precarious’ (p.87). To what extent do such arguments support a relationship between a scientist’s epistemic access to different scales and the categorisation of constants? What are the implications of this view for modern cosmology, in particular the interpretation of the cosmological constant, the nature of time, and the quantization of gravity? And what does any of this have to do with Robots? In this talk I will attempt to answer these and other related questions. (Based on work with Sean Gryb (University of Groningen).)