Seminar series
Date
Mon, 18 May 2009
Time
12:00 -
13:00
Location
L3
Speaker
Fay Dowker
Organisation
Imperial College
Abstract: Despite the high regard in which physicists hold General Relativity, the spacetime nature of reality has not yet fully been taken to heart in addressing the question of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Partial progress was made by Dirac and Feynman by casting the dynamical content of quantum theory in terms of a Sum Over (spacetime) Histories (SOH). Recently it has been suggested by Sorkin that this SOH is part of an interpretive framework in which the rules of inference that are used to reason about physical reality are themselves subject to dynamical law. Just as General Relativity showed that geometry is not fixed and absolute, so Quantum Mechanics may be telling us that logical rules of inference are not fixed but part of physics.