Talk by Smolin tomorrow (Wednesday)

[Martin]

Perimeter Institute often posts video for seminar talks

so they might do that for Smolin's talk Wednesday 11 October

I'd be glad if some others tried watching it----it may be aimed at non-specialist audience and understandable. Something some of us might discuss.

 

or it could turn out to be for QG specialists only, in which case if you don't understand just turn it off.

 

I don't know if it will be a talk for general audience or not, or what the topic will be---it is listed as TBA (to be announced)

 

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?lang=en

look down the menu at the right for the list of upcoming seminars

 

the streaming media resources are posted here

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca:81/mediasite/viewer/

in the left menu, click on "seminar series" to get the list of seminar talks

which have been posted.

[Sisyphus]

Alright, Martin, it's time to come clean.

 

Are you Lee Smolin, or do you just have stock in his publisher?

[Martin]

Alright, Martin, it's time to come clean.

 

Are you Lee Smolin, or do you just have stock in his publisher?

 

heh heh,

neither, I regret to say.

I wish I could have invested in that book. It has done way better than anyone could have expected.

 

Amazon.com used to have it in stock since mid September, but a couple of days ago they apparently sold out!

they are now shiping as soon as books come in, so they are backlogged with orders

[Martin]

Ah-hah! I just checked the Perimeter site and Smolin had posted the title of his Wednesday talk

 

===quote===

Speaker: Lee Smolin

Title: Could quantum mechanics be an approximation to another, cosmological, theory?

Date: Wednesday October 11, 2006, 2:00 PM

Abstract: We consider the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is an approximation to another, cosmological theory,[and that quantum mechanics is] accurate only for the description of subsystems of the universe. Quantum theory is then to be derived from the cosmological theory by averaging over variables which are not internal to the subsystem, which may be considered non-local hidden variables. I will explain the motivation for this view, give some examples of theories of this kind and investigate general conditions for such an approach to succeed.

 

===endquote===

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/activities/scientific/seminarseries/alltalks.cfm?CurrentPage=1&SeminarID=825

 

that means he will be illustrating and explaining stuff from a paper the just posted on arxiv.org.

I, and anybody else who wants to follow the talk (assuming it is broadcast at the streamer site) can have a look at the paper first

 

===quote from the brief summary===

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609109

Could quantum mechanics be an approximation to another theory?

Authors: Lee Smolin

Comments: 10 pages, no figures

 

We consider the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is an approximation to another, cosmological theory, accurate only for the description of subsystems of the universe. Quantum theory is then to be derived from the cosmological theory by averaging over variables which are not internal to the subsystem, which may be considered non-local hidden variables. We find conditions for arriving at quantum mechanics through such a procedure. The key lesson is that the effect of the coupling to the external degrees of freedom introduces noise into the evolution of the system degrees of freedom, while preserving a notion of averaged conserved energy and time reversal invariance.

These conditions imply that the effective description of the subsystem is Nelson's stochastic formulation of quantum theory. We show that Nelson's formulation is not, by itself, a classical stochastic theory as the conserved averaged energy is not a linear function of the probability density. We also investigate an argument of Wallstrom posed against the equivalence of Nelson's stochastic mechanics and quantum mechanics and show that, at least for a simple case, it is in error.

 

Full-text: PostScript, PDF, or Other formats

===endquote===

 

so you can download the 10-page PDF of this recent paper and look it over before (as I am hoping) they broadcast the video (if they do)

 

OK, so the idea is that Quantum Mechanics might be NOT FUNDAMENTAL but instead might be a superficial description of a deeper theory.

Smolin is not committing himself on this issue, but is tentatively working out what the more fundamental more true theory might look like, if there is one.

[Martin]

Perimeter Institute often posts video for seminar talks

so they might do that for Smolin's talk Wednesday 11 October

I'd be glad if some others tried watching it----it may be aimed at non-specialist audience and understandable. Something some of us might discuss.

 

or it could turn out to be for QG specialists only, in which case if you don't understand just turn it off.

 

I don't know if it will be a talk for general audience or not, or what the topic will be---it is listed as TBA (to be announced)

 

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?lang=en

look down the menu at the right for the list of upcoming seminars

 

the streaming media resources are posted here

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca:81/mediasite/viewer/

in the left menu, click on "seminar series" to get the list of seminar talks

which have been posted.

 

In fact they did post Smolin's wednesday seminar talk at

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca:81/mediasite/viewer/

 

it is a great talk!

 

big crowd (for Perimeter Institute, compared with other talks there) and

obvious excitement. a lot of questions at the end.

(also some interrupting in the middle)

 

the talk is about an hour, then some 10 or 15 minutes of discussion with audience IIRC