«The important thing is not to stop questioning» (A. Einstein)
Семинары
Общелабораторный семинар
Дата и время: четверг, 3 мая 2018 г., в 15:00
Место: Конференц-зал им. Блохинцева (4-й этаж), Лаборатория теоретической физики им. Н.Н. Боголюбова
Тема семинара: «The important thing is not to stop questioning» (A. Einstein)
Докладчик: Daniel Sternheimer (Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan; Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Honorary Professor of Physics, St. Petersburg State University)
Аннотация:
Modern science is a Babel tower, the foundations of which are too often forgotten. Yet revolutions may occur when one takes seriously an essential question: «Is it necessarily so?» Which can bring us to question the bases of well established models. Indeed a successful model (such as the «Standard Model») is based on assumptions that are sufficient to explain existing data, but may not be necessary. In 1960 Wigner (who in 1963 got the Nobel Prize in physics for «the discovery and applications of fundamental symmetry principles» marveled about «the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,» referring mainly to physics. We shall exemplify all this by first explaining how a posteriori relativity and quantum mechanics can be obtained from previously known theories using the mathematical theory of deformations. Then we briefly review some main features of the standard model of elementary particles and how it arose from empirically guessed symmetries. Finally we indicate how, questioning its foundations, its symmetries might be obtained from those of relativity using deformations (including quantization), which poses hard mathematical problems and might eventually question half a century of particle physics.