Thursday, January 27, 2011

Talk by Michael Atiyah on February one

On Tuesday February First, at eleven in Salle 5 of College de France, Sir Michael Atiyah will deliver a talk entitled "A Geometor explores the Universe". His abstract is the following:
"In the past decades theoretical physicists have been using ever more sophisticated mathematics to model the universe and its fundamental forces. Quantum Theory and Geometry are the two main ingredients but there are different schools of thought on how to fuse them together.
Einstein, with his success in General Relativity, argued for the primacy of Geometry and Dirac said we should be guided by beauty.  I belong to this camp and am tentatively exploring some new ideas."

6 comments:

Christopher Duston said...

Is it inappropriate to ask someone to record and post the talk? I would be very interested to see this!

AC said...

I asked the talk to be filmed by the College and hope it will then be made available.

Matheus said...

Tangentially related to Christopher's question and AC reply: about two months ago Sir M. Atiyah gave a similar talk at IMPA and the corresponding video is available at this link (http://strato.impa.br/videos/misc/atiyah_01122010.avi)

Unknown said...

Atiyah's talk will be filmed is a good news, so thank you very much. It would be also wonderful if the lecture of the college of France of Pr.Connes are filmed.

AC said...

The video of Atiyah's talk is
now available at
http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/ana_geo/Conference_du_1er_fevrier_2011.jsp

fp_iml said...

Almost fifteen minutes after the beginning of the video, Atiyah asks to Pr.Connes: Is this shifted Dirac operator related to the Connes model of two copies of space time close together? Hence, Pr.Connes: do you have an answer or is this too speculative? I see on arxiv that other people are trying to give some physical interpretation or consequences to this two copies of the universe for instance: Non commutative spectral geometry, algebra doubling and the seeds of quantization (Sakellariadou, Stabile, Vitiello) (arXiv:1106.4164) which seems quite speculative??
What is your thinking? Do you think that a physical interpretation is missing?