Presenters:   Elio Caccavale   Dawn Danby   Olaf Dreyer   Juan Geuer   Rob Godman   John Hatch   Kenneth A. Huff   Mantissa   Miroslav Lovric   Sally McKay   Eric Raymond   S. David Rosner   Mariano Sardón   Frederic P. Schuller   Krister Shalm   Lydia Sharman &   Stephen Morris   Donald Spector   Joseph Thywissen   Marion Tränkle   Koala Yip Symposium Space Matters by Frederic P. Schuller Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Physical concepts are a mental picture of something we have no direct access to, and which one might naively call 'the world', or 'reality'. In physics, we discuss such a picture of reality, not reality itself. There are many pictures, and the development of physical theory is a sequence of such. It is often said that the picture is becoming increasingly refined, and thus approaches the best picture of reality. Strictly speaking, this statement is meaningless. We have no notion of the proximity of two pictures (as would be needed to define convergence against a given limit picture), nor do we know about the existence or uniqueness of such a 'best' picture. At the level of fundamental physical theory, the entities of our thinking can only be defined in a relational manner. Space and matter, for instance, seem to imply each other, if one attempts a definition of space as the potential locations of matter. Our thinking, also in Einstein's general relativity and quantum theory, is based on the dichotomy of space and matter, as I will explain in some hopefully insightful detail in the first part of my talk. The second part of the talk shows how to push the boundaries of that picture to the limit, and explains how a quantum theory of gravity might finally weave space and matter into one fundamental concept. Biography: Frederic P. Schuller is a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research focuses on the mathematical structure of space-time, and was awarded the Erice Original Work Award in 2003. He is a Fellow of the German National Merit Foundation, and obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, where he was as an Isaac Newton Fellow.   Page Top Copyright © 2004 Subtle Technologies Festival