The Deep Structure of Spacetime

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• Fay Dawker, Imperial College
• Thursday 11 November 2010, 13:45-15:00
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Dimitri M Gangardt.

I will begin by recalling what we know about the ``surface’‘ structure of spacetime: what spacetime appears to be, as far as we can tell. This surface structure is a Lorentzian manifold and I will exhibit a proof that (give a certain causality condition, somewhat stronger than the non-existence of closed causal loops) the so-called causal structure of a Lorentzian manifold determines 9/10 of the metric (in 3+1 dimensions). I will briefly rehearse the circumstantial evidence that leads many physicists to believe that there is a discrete, atomic ``deep structure’’ to spacetime and then introduce the causal set as a concrete proposal for that deep structure. I will report on recent efforts to identify ``smoking gun’‘ signatures of the atomicity of spacetime, signatures which could be the ``Brownian motion’’ of our age.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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• Bham Talks
• Theoretical Physics Seminars
• Theory Library
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