Piombino Conference (DICE2006)

[marcus]

http://mail.df.unipi.it/~elze/DICE2006.html

Francesca just called our attention to this conference which has an interesting list of speakers as well as a graphically beautiful announcement.

Piombino is a restored Renaissance castle town on the coast south of Livorno

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Even though the conference is 3 months in the future, a surprising number of the invited speakers have already announced the titles of their talks. I was interested to see who was invited and what they have chosen to talk about. Francesca already mentioned a number of these names and lecture-titles.


Invited Lectures (*: to be confirmed)


S. Adler (IAS, Princeton)
Is quantum theory a form of statistical mechanics?
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O. Bertolami (IST, Lisboa)
Field dynamics in the bulk and on the brane and Lorentz symmetry.
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S. Boccaletti (CNR, Firenze)
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D. Bruss (Univ. Düsseldorf)
Detection of entanglement.
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S. Carlip (Univ. of California, Davis)
Black hole entropy and the problem of universality.
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G. Casati (Univ. di Studi Dell'Insubria, Como)
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E. Del Giudice (INFN & Univ. di Milano)
Old and new views on the structure of matter and the special case of living matter.
(Public Lecture in Italian)
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L. Diosi (Res. Inst. Part. & Nucl. Phys., Budapest)
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H.-T. Elze (Univ. di Pisa)
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G.C. Ghirardi (INFN & ICTP, Trieste)
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C. Grebogi* (Univ. Sao Paulo)
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J. Halliwell (Imperial College, London)
Commuting position and momentum operators,
exact decoherence and emergent classicality.
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G. 't Hooft (Spinoza Institute & Univ. Utrecht)
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K. Hornberger (LM-Univ. München)
Quantum version of the linear Boltzmann equation.
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B.-L. Hu (Univ. of Maryland)
What is quantum gravity if spacetime was emergent?
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A. Iorio (Brown Univ. & Univ. di Salerno)
Einstein under siege: a bird's-eye view of Lorentz-violating scenarios.
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C. Kiefer (Univ. of Cologne)
Origin of classical structure in the Universe.
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H. Kleinert (Freie Univ., Berlin)
QFT of multivalued fields and Gaussian models of transitions.
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V. Latora (Univ. di Catania)
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G. Mahler (Univ. Stuttgart)
Emergence of thermodynamics from quantum mechanics.
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F. Markopoulou (Perimeterinstitute, Waterloo)
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N. Mavromatos (King's College, London)
Dark energy and neutrinos: a critical review of recent approaches.
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T. Padmanabhan (IUCAA at Pune)
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M. Plenio (Imperial College, London)
Entanglement, area and dynamics in harmonic lattice systems.
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J. Pullin (Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge)
Spatio-temporal fundamental decoherence from quantum gravity.
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S. Sarkar (King's College, London)
Neutral meson entanglement, decoherence and CPT.
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V. Scarani (Univ. Geneve)
Non-locality without Hilbert spaces.
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M. Schlosshauer (Univ. of Queensland)
Putting mechanics back into the quantum:
Decoherence in quantum electromechanical systems.
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L. Smolin* (Perimeterinstitute, Waterloo)
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R.D. Sorkin* (Univ. of Syracuse)
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G. Veneziano* (CERN, Geneva)
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G. Vitiello (Univ. di Salerno)
Coherent domain formation and the role of the e.m. field.
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[marcus]

I think that inspecting the year's conferences is a little like when you go for the annual checkup at the doctors: they measure the temperature in your ear, and maybe take a blood sample, and look you over for whatever symptoms

as if one could tell what is happening by watching the flight of birds
or seeing where they are having riots and which shuttle diplomats are hopping this way and that.

So even though I do not GO very many places I still suspect by keeping alert to get a sense of what is going on.

At any rate, whether or not one can actually tell anything, here is the DICE2006 list of topics:

1. Decoherence and the quantum-to-classical transition

2. Nonlinear dynamics, gravity, cosmology and the "problem(s) of time" ---implications for emergent theories of quantum mechanics and space-time

3. Extensions and interpretations of quantum theory

=======================

what is to get from this?
A. that theories of QM and spacetime are appearing on the scene---becoming a more substantial presence (topic 2)

B. that some people (Hartle, 't Hooft, to mention only two) expect that it will be necessary to extend or modify Quantum formalities in order to handle the merger of QM and spacetime theory. (topic 3)

C. that the talk that seems by its title to be most "on topic" is by someone I don't know called Bei-Lok Hu, of Maryland University. His American name is Bernard Hu.
(What is quantum gravity if spacetime was emergent?)
Indeed what if the microscopic dynamics of spacetime and matter, down at Planckscale, was "something completely different" and the classical pattern just "emerged" at macroscopic scale?
Bernard Hu was one of the organizers' Advisory Board so one can expect that his talk would be on topic.

One could almost say the flip side of Hu's title is that of Claus Kiefer (Köln). His talk is on Origin of classical structure in the Universe. So if the structure is not classical at micro-level, how does the familiar structure arise or "emerge" at large scale?D. For some reason DECOHERENCE is on people's minds.
Jorge Pullin (Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge), whose talk is
Spatio-temporal fundamental decoherence from quantum gravity, has written some papers with Rodolfo Gambini and Rafaelo Porto which purport to prove, by an elegant method, that quantum states must very very slowly decohere. The proof uses a Black Hole Gedankenexperiment to discover an interesting bound on the lifetime-accuracy of any real clock. There are only real clocks in nature, so it is redundant to say "real, quantum clock", but one must nevertheless say it from time to time. Somebody organizing the conference thought the Gambini Pullin work on fundamental unavoidable decoherence was important enough to bring Pullin there.

E. Max Tegmark (who has an interest both in cosmology and in foundational questions) is one of the organizer's Advisory Board. It might be a bellweather---a wind-indicator. For several decades physicists have found it practical and useful to dodge foundational issues like "what is space?" and "why is that dimension?" and "what makes time happen?" heh heh. You see it still sounds a bit useless and "philosophical" to ask such questions. but several good physicists in the past, like Maxwell and Newton and Einstein HAVE ASKED PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS! So we realize that FASHIONS CHANGE in physics and for a long time, as we are conditioned to think, it was useless to be too concerned with foundational issues and one could go faster by just attacking obvious problems in a heedless slapdash manner.
But it is symptomatic, I think, that these people are gathering to consider at least part-time some foundational questions. this is becoming a macho thing that at least some normal physicists do. Like skateboarding, or having beer and bottle-rockets on the beach. Not just for philosophy dudes. So there is this nuance.

 

[marcus]

DICE stands for Decoherence, Information, Complexity and Entropy.
DICE 2004 was held at the same place: Castello di Piombino (Tuscany), September 1-4, 2004.

Here are some published proceedings for the 2004 workshop
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?scr...0103-97332005000200001&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

It is not much, just a page. Apparently Springer Lecture Notes published some or all of the invited talks given at DICE2004

 

[francesca]

I was interested to see who was invited and what they have chosen to talk about.

Smolin said that he can't partecipate because in September he'll be waiting for the coming out of his new book... and his new baby ;-)

 

[marcus]

Hey Francesca, that is exciting news! Maybe the baby will have a recedinhg hairline like Smolin and like to do quantum gravity!

I really liked your pick of the interesting talks that you posted here
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1009991#post1009991

I want to copy it into this thread

Note the speakers:

S. Carlip (Univ. of California, Davis)
Black hole entropy and the problem of universality.

J. Halliwell (Imperial College, London)
Commuting position and momentum operators, exact decoherence and emergent classicality.

G. 't Hooft (Spinoza Institute & Univ. Utrecht)

B.-L. Hu (Univ. of Maryland)
What is quantum gravity if spacetime was emergent?

F. Markopoulou (Perimeterinstitute, Waterloo)

T. Padmanabhan (IUCAA at Pune)

J. Pullin (Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge)
Spatio-temporal fundamental decoherence from quantum gravity.

M. Schlosshauer (Univ. of Queensland)
Decoherence in quantum electromechanical systems.

D. Oriti (Univ. of Cambridge)
A field theory picture for simplicial quantum geometry and the emergence of spacetime.

and many others.

I noticed that you put mostly INVITED talks in your list but you also included one regular contribution, which has an interesting titleBTW the new book as I think you know is THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS and it is likely to provoke hot controversy and get much reaction. (Already the Financial Times of London, and the Sunday Times, must be getting a lot of outraged letters from string theorists just for their positive reviews of Peter Woit's book. Smolin's book is explicitly critical of the conduct of US research funding policy and the reaction should really be fun.) So I can understand that Smolin wants to keep his schedule clear at around September when the book is due out.

 

[francesca]

In the other thread https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=123042" we came to talk about emergence, so I introduced the conference thinking about decoherence... I'm really interested in decoherence, even if I'm totally ignorant I hope someone here would anticipate some issues of the conference!

I have also mentioned Giuliano Preparata and his work on QED, he did a great use of coherence concept... He was a great physicist, maybe I can spur someone getting to know him if I told that he was the only one who work on cold fusion from the theoretical side, I he did it well.BTW when I saw conference speakers I tried to invite Smolin giving a popular lecture to an italian literature festival, so that he would present his new book. He declined the invite for the reasons given up. We wait for him next year with Markopoulou. Instead I'm proud to annunce that Oriti has accepted to come.

 

[CarlB]

The lecture I'd most like to hear is this one:

V. Scarani (Univ. Geneve)
Non-locality without Hilbert spaces.
http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0603/0603017.pdf

Reason being is that I'm busily working on a foundation for quantum mechanics that is based on density matrices and avoids the use of Hilbert spaces. It's based on Schwinger's measurement algebra.

Carl