Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Vera Matarese (22 January on Zoom)

On Friday, 22 January, Vera Matarese (University of Bern) will give a talk entitled “Spacetime the many substances” (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 recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO’s YouTube channel.

Abstract:

The view that loop quantum gravity’s spin-networks represent concrete atoms of space is proposed in Vassallo & Esfeld (2014), which adopts a primitive ontology approach to spacetime. Rovelli (2015), on the contrary, warns against this literal interpretation, and regards the ‘chunks’ of space represented by spin-networks as ‘modes of interactions’. In my talk, I will not engage in the legitimacy of the interpretation of spin-networks as concrete atoms of space from a physical perspective. I will rather spell out the metaphysical advantages and disadvantages of endorsing such a view and discuss conceptual issues by drawing on the metaphysical debate on the atomistic view of spacetime. My conclusion will be that the loop quantum gravity’s discrete model of space, according to which space is a collection of many substances—‘the atoms of space’—has certain metaphysically advantageous consequences that have been hitherto overlooked.