Colloquium Mathematics, Prof.dr. N.P. Landsman, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

Join us for coffee and tea at 15.30 p.m.

Date:                          Tuesday, April 16^th 2013
Speaker:                     Klaas Landsman (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Room:                         5161.0293 (Bernoulliborg)
Time:                          16.00

Title: Asymptotic emergence

Abstract:

Opponents of a reductionist view of science (who often have a religious agenda) claim that certain (macroscopic) properties or and/or laws may "emerge" all of a sudden in some limiting regime of a given (microscopic) theory. One of their strongest cases is what physicist call spontaneous symmetry breaking, which according to official mathematical physics (Groningen style, i.e., using C*-algebras) indeed cannot exist in finite quantum systems and hence seems to be an "emergent" property of physics in the thermodynamic limit. We explain this example, which has brought reductionists (like the speaker) to despair, but we also show that due to a very subtle mathematical mechanism this threat to reductionism can be neutralized.

To understand this talk all you need to know is elementary Hilbert space theory and popular-science level quantum physics.

Colloquium coordinators are Prof.dr. A.C.D. van Enter (e-mail : A.C.D.van.Enter@rug.nl) and

Dr. A.V. Kiselev (e-mail: a.v.kiselev rug.nl)

http://www.rug.nl/research/jbi/news/colloquia/mathematics-colloquia/