Theory of everything: what scientists are dreaming about

Brief description:

At last, what if one thing is massive, small, and fast? This is the smallest scale conceivable, the so-called Planck scale at which the matter and space-time are expected to get blurred into one only concept. That's the realm of what scientists often call the theory of everything. However, what is this scientific model and how bizarre it could be, nobody really knows yet.

Over the last 50 years, scientists have come up with many intriguing ideas. We still have a long way to go, as the Planck scale is fifteen orders of magnitude away from modern experiments, roughly the same number of orders that ancient Greeks were away from modern science. We can only wonder how many new exciting discoveries await us falling down such world!

PDF of the lecture

https://youtu.be/NXhfz1lWiRs 

Approximate plan for the lecture:

Part I - Standard model and Beyond

• All objects in Nature come as the result of a balance

  • Chemical matter - electricity vs quantum uncertainty

  • Stars - electricity vs gravity vs fusion  

  • Baryon (neutron) matter - gravity vs quantum uncertainty

  • Black holes - gravity vs mass-energy

  • Compton bound on the matter size - quantum uncertainty vs mass-energy

• Microscopic laws = quantum principle + symmetry

  • Problems with infinities. Planck formula and discovery of quantum mechanics. Cosmic Microwave Background

  • Gauge symmetries - all known interactions is a geometry

  • Taming infinities - controllable and incontrollable models

  • The hardest way to earn one million dollars

  • Asymptotic freedom. Quark-gluon plasma.

  • Beyond Baryons. Unification of electromagnetic and weak forces. Towards Grand Unification scales

Part II- Towards theory of Quantum gravity

• Problems with gravity

  • Dark matter

  • Vacuum is non-empty: Casimir effect. Cosmological constant problem

  • So what's the problem with quantising gravity?

• Candidates for quantum gravity theories (a selected sublist)

  • Loop quantum gravity: Pick better observables 

  • String theory: No more point particles

  • Casual dynamical triangulations: Discretise space-time as in a computer game

• Holography

  • Hawking radiation and entropy of black holes

  • Gauge/gravity correspondence

  • Back to the real world: Applications 

• Conclusion