Lise-Meitner-Lecture
Professor Renate Loll from the Utrecht University, The Netherlands will speak about: "More than meets the eye: probing the planckian structure of spacetime”. The lecture will be given in German.
The lecture will take place in room H 0105 on Thursday, 29 March, 18 - 19:00 Uhr.
Abstract
More than meets the eye: Probing the
Planckian structure of spacetime — ∙Renate Loll — Institute
for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Time and Space are at once ubiquitous and mysterious. We are immersed
in space and experience the flow of time, but what is their
essence and origin? Our view of space and time has undergone radical
changes since Newton’s days. In Relativity, they form inseparable
parts of a four-dimensional “spacetime”, which moreover can bend and
move, encoding the gravitational interactions of matter and energy.
Beyond the validity of Einstein’s classical theory, we expect further
insights into the nature of spacetime from quantum gravity, the eagerly
searched-for unification of relativity and quantum theory: what
governs the quantum dynamics of spacetime on ultrashort, Planckian
scales? How can it explain the observed macroscopic structure
of spacetime? Are space, time, causality and dimensionality still
meaningful notions at the Planck scale, or merely emergent properties
of a dynamical ensemble of more fundamental microscopic ‘building
blocks’?
I will report on recent, unprecedented progress in a new formulation
of quantum gravity, a concrete (and computable!) realization in
terms of “Causal Dynamical Triangulations” of a Feynman path integral.
Intriguingly, it has been possible to extract physical properties
of this quantum superposition of spacetimes with the help of numerical
“experiments”. They confirm the nonclassical and counter-intuitive
nature of spacetime at the Planck scale - including a bizarre behaviour
of “dimensions” - and the emergence of classicality on large scales.