Report on QGQG-1 school from Alejandro Satz, with his photos

[marcus]

good detailed reporting
photographs
Part 1 of report---Thomas Thiemann's lectures including the Master Constraint, the achievement of the classical limit, Eugenio Bianchi's explanation of the LQG graviton paper of Rovelli et al, Laurent Freidel and Etera Livine spinfoam talks development of Feynman diagram for matter from QG
http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/report-on-quantum-gravity-school_08.html

Part 2 of report---Martin Reuter's QEG assymptotic safety
http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/report-on-quantum-gravity-school_10.html

thanks to f-h for pointing us to Alejandro Satz blog for this report!

some beautiful pictures of snowy mountain scenery and the Quantum Gravitists having fun
http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/report-on-quantum-gravity-school.html

 

[marcus]

I have been an appreciative reader of Satz blog for well over a year but to me this is the best most helpful of his posting yet. Almost the most useful reportage on any blog of any conference or workshop.

A curious side comment. Richard Kostecki one of the local organizers (the Warsaw professorship of Gravity and Gen Rel) put up the official poster for the school some time back, which we linked to at PF, and the poster said
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~kostecki/school.html
"The First Quantum Geometry and Quantum Gravity School"

Notice the nuance of the word order. Quantum Geometry comes first giving indication that the kind of quantum gravity we are talking about is
quantum geometrical quantum gravity.

that is not a flat minkowski space of QFT with some gravitons to represent the force, but a real General Relativistic treatment, with no fixed background geometry, where gravity IS SHAPE and therefore quantum gravity must be the QUANTIZED DESCRIPTION OF SHAPE, in other words it must be quantum geometrical QG. Which is how Quantum Gravitists of the LQG, spinfoam, and related approaches do in fact think of it.

and this is how the European Science Foundation (ESF) lists it
http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/physical-and-engineering-sciences-pesc.html

and how John Barrett co-director of QGQG has it at his Nottingham UK site.

But the tendency is still to think and say it in a switchedaround order, as
"quantum gravity and quantum geometry[/color]"

ESF funding commitment is for 5 years, to July 2011.
here is the ESF discription
http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/physical-and-engineering-sciences-pesc/current-esf-research-networking-programmes-in-pesc/quantum-geometry-and-quantum-gravity-qg.html

"Quantum Geometry and Quantum Gravity
Summary

The main objective of the programme is to stimulate the exchange of ideas between researchers pursuing different approaches to quantum geometry and apply the results to the study of quantum gravity.

The research programme will study several approaches to quantum gravity, namely loop quantum gravity, spin foam models, dynamical triangulations and matrix models. The common theme is the occurrence of quantum geometry in all these approaches. The research programme will study mathematical tools and techniques in non-commutative geometry and quantum groups and their applications to quantum gravity.

The planned activities are workshops and conferences, schools and programmes of research visits. These are designed to increase the level of interaction between existing research groups and to give a broad education in all the approaches to a new generation of young researchers."

Maybe most people care little about nuances like this or the precise architecture of how science funding and support for advanced theory research is organized. But doubtless some are involved with science administration at some level and prepared to appreciate how the ESF crafted this.

For completeness here is also John Barrett's Nottingham QGQG site
http://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/qg/
which says "quantum geometry and quantum gravity"
=================
but, just like you or I would Alejandro Satz, who does a great blog report, says "quantum gravity and quantum geometry"

 

[marcus]

things are certainly moving fast
Alejandro reports conversations with Thiemann and with Bianchi about recent LQG-incarnations achieving correct classical limit
(something we also heard about in recent Bojowald papers)

And Alejandro says that Reuter's assymptotic safe QEG was a surprise hit and roused a big discussion.

Shifting attention for the moment from the QGQG-1 school to the April APS meeting in Florida, there some interesting parallels in what the hot topics are. First off, there is the interesting fact that this year the LQG community attained rough PARITY with string in the NUMBER OF INVITED SPEAKERS at the April APS meeting. More about that here: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=164904 There are five invited string talks and roughly comparable three invited non-string background-independent QG talks.

Looking more closely at the topics of the invited talks---two of them will be about things that Alejandro stressed especially from Zakopane.
For example, he reported an indepth discussion with Bianchi about the
Rovelli et al LQG gravitons paper, that Bianchi co-authored. But at the April meeting of the American Physical Society, Simone Speziale (who collaborated on that with Rovelli) will give a talk about it.

Likewise Alejandro reported a big interest in assymptotic safety in Reuter's QEG
that will be the subject of the third talk at the April meeting in Florida, given by Niedermayer.

Alejandro didn't mention LQC, but for completeness I'll add that first talk in the non-string QG session at the APS meeting will be about recent advances in LQC. The invited speaker will be Singh, a close collaboratof of both Bojowald and Ashtekar.
=================

one of the nice little details was the rough parity with string----there are FIVE invited string talks this time. three of them will be prize-acceptance talks and will, I expect, cover a fair amount of research history.
notice that the string community massively outnumbers non-string QG, so it is in some sense surprising that one would get a rough parity in representation.

it is a detail to notice, but to refrain from reading too much significance into

 

[f-h]

Asymptotic Safety was indeed THE topic.

Maybe the part of it is that most of the attendants will go away and start to seriously and deeply study renormalization and effective field theory.
I think it will take some time until we understand how to interface this stuff with Spinfoams, etc.

 

[marcus]

Alejandro says to expect a report (possibly as early as today or Monday) about the group discussion "Where are we in the path toward QG?"
http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/upstuff.html

he had a report almost finished Friday but a Blogger software accident wiped it out
(when that kind of thing happens it is doubly difficult to reconstruct the post because one is so infuriated by the nuisance)
I hope he does find time to redo the report. that discussion could have been quite an interesting one.

If anyone is new to this topic, this was a discussion led by Carlo Rovelli at the
first Quantum Geometry Quantum Gravity school (QGQG-1)
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~kostecki/school.html

 

[path-integral]

Hi,
I've recorded all talks on QGQG-1 school, also both Carlo's talks, and currently I'm working on enchance the quality of these recordings (cutting the silence, noise reduction and so on - however, generally the quality is good+), and I hope to publish it soon. All raw data is about 3 GB of .mp3's so there is also a problem where to put them. I've asked John Barrett for some space on ESF/QGQG site, and hopefully we'll publish it soon. I'll try also to collect all lecture notes, but this procedure may be only asymptotically renormalizable :). In any case, surely at least the notes of Ruth Williams [waiting to scan] and presentations of Jean-Marc Schlenker, Tomek Pawłowski i Paweł Kasprzak will be avaible soon. I've collected also >1GB of photos from many participants, and soon I'll select some of them and put it on the web.

BTW, in unofficial comments of many participants, Carlo's talk was considered as the best school's talk, very probably because it was an attempt of personal, hence subjective, view on the full scope of QG&QG [in the non-string context]. The phrase "DO NOT BELIEVE YOUR TEACHERS" may become a catch-word (or an upstuff for the new young generation of PhD's.

Rick Kostecki

 

[path-integral]

ps. and may also not become :)
and may also become something different, like Heyting-algebraists say.

 

[Kea]

...and may also become something different, like Heyting-algebraists say.

Heh, heh, heh. That's the spirit!

 

[marcus]

Thanks for recording R.K., it's great to have notes and audio to look forward to!

Alejandro Satz just put up a fourth posting about the school on his blog:
http://realityconditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/report-on-quantum-gravity-school_12.html

This is about Rovelli's discussion of a list of 20-or-so detailed questions that the QGQG-1 participants on the general theme: Where are we on the path to quantum gravity?

 

[jal]

from reality conditions
16) and 17) Both questions were variations on "the problem of time".

Rovelli gave an answer which will be familiar to those who have read his book Quantum Gravity, and which I find persuasive. The motto is that physics is about relations and correlations of observables between many variables, and it is not possible in general to single out one variable as "time" and discuss the change of all the rest of the variables with respect to this one. One should first learn to do both classical dynamics and quantum mechanics with this "relational" way of thinking, and then apply it to quantum gravity. All this is discussed at length in the book.

I also agree.
Too much interpretations of the labels lead people astray and into science fiction.
jal

 

[ccdantas]

New photos available:

http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~kostecki/photos/qgqg/index.html


Christine

 

[francesca]

Dear Rick,
shame of you... you put our pictures of the last day:
it seems as we were all bored, we were only very tired!
:zzz: :zzz: :zzz:

 

[marcus]

Dear Rick,
shame of you... you put our pictures of the last day:

Mostly you look tired (as you should) and satisfied. The pictures speak well for a successful intensive course.

 

[ccdantas]

Tired? You? No, you all look great!

*I* am tired.

 

[francesca]

To tell the true there was some boring lectures, the ones in cosmology...
I was afraid because I was waiting for these.
Substituting Ashtekar is not an easy job, I think: what a load!

 

[marcus]

Substituting Ashtekar is not an easy job...

I remember the first announcement had Ashtekar. I copied the list of lecturers as of 19 December 2006 here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1193663&postcount=121
At some point Ashtekar must have told them he couldn't make the engagement and that one of the Penn State
postdocs who have been co-authoring with him would give the Loop cosmology talks in his place.

 

[path-integral]

Tired? You? No, you all look great!

*I* am tired.

So see, it depends on observer