Special Universe Talk: Rethinking the Foundations of Physics: An Introduction to Influence Theory

by Kevin Knuth (University at Albany, USA)

Thursday 28 Apr 2016, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room (Excellence Cluster Universe, Boltzmannstrasse 2, Garching)

Physics is traditionally conceived of as a set of laws that universally governs the behavior of physical systems. These laws, however they are decreed, are believed to govern the behavior of not only everything in the universe, but the form of the universe itself. However, this traditional concept of physics as an universal governance is at odds with our modern theories of quantum mechanics and relativity, which place the observer and information in a central role. In this talk, Kevin aims to rethink the foundations and attempts to build physics from the bottom up based on the very simple foundational idea that all one can possibly know is that there exist things that influence one another. This is called Influence Theory. He will demonstrate that a great deal of physics can be derived in this context from symmetries and consistent quantification. For example, one can show that there is a unique consistent quantified description of a network of influence events, which is given by the mathematics of relativistic space-time. Moreover, from this theory, one can derive that our description of space-time can only be 1+1 or 3+1 dimensional. In addition, making inferences about influence events leads to the relativistic quantum mechanics of fermions. As a result, many ‘fundamental’ concepts in physics and their relationships to one another can be derived from a more fundamental picture based on influence. For more details, see: Knuth K.H. 2016. Understanding the electron. Springer Frontiers Collection, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.07766v1.pdf