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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Above are attempts to draw states of background independence by myself and participants at the workshop "Full on Gall" organised by Pat Sullivan at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre yesterday afternoon. Not too many of us were brave enough to tackle the background independence problem, but at my activity table we also drew lots of pictures of neutrinos and of the universe. I will post more of these most excellent artworks in the days to come. Gordon Hicks had a very cool and puzzling plotter for making drawings that was programmed like a slightly bonkers etch-a-sketch. Rebecca Diederichs engineered a lushous interactive mural with overhead projectors and found thing-a-ma-bobs. There was also a black box collaborative sculpture experiment and of course, the ever popular Schrödinger's cat balloon. Art MacDonald from SNO lab had a table with great images and information about the project. It was super fun.
What do you like better...background dependence, or background independence?
What do you like better...vulnerability or invulnerability?
In case anyone was wondering about the state of string theory today, this review by Sean Carroll of Lee Smolin's new book, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, and the subsequent debate in the comment thread (in which Lee Smolin participates) gives a good picture. I gave myself permission to skip over the bits that read like this:
"The correlation function W(x,y) ~ |x-y|^-2h. is clearly not diffeomorphism invariant."and instead attempt to grasp the bits that read like this:
"[A fundamental theory] cannot-by definition-have a more fundamental underpinning. So it must stand up on its own. This means we must be able to formulate it cleanly and precisely and the important properties it enjoys should be theorems. It doesn’t mean physicists should all work at a rigorous level, but that rigorous framework must be there to refer to.
This is not an unrealizable ideal. Classical Newtonian mechanics satisfies it. So does classical statistical mechanics, ordinary non-relativisitic quantum mechanics and general relativity. In each of these cases there is a body of rigorous results and a community of mathematical physicists who work on them.
Is this too much to hope for theories of quantum gravity. No!"
 | I will be giving a free performative lecture at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ont. on Sunday, October 15th at 1:30pm, and then Rebecca Diederichs, Gordon Hicks and I, with participation from the Queen's Department of Physics, will be hosting a free workshop/lab at the gallery until 5pm. Please join us for the events and visit our exhibition, Neutrinos They Are Very Small (on display until December 10th). Note: Rumour has it our lovely catalogue designed by the inimitable Lisa Kiss might be delivered in time for the event. Agnes Etherington Art Centre University Avenue at Bader Lane Queen's University, Kingston, ON Tel: 613.533.2190 | Fax: 613.533.6765 Email: aeac@post.queensu.ca |
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