Events

Title: Some Swampland Conjectures and their Cosmological Applications

Abstract: String theory, the most promising candidate for fundamental laws, leads to a vast landscape of possible universes. It appears that there are no obstructions to realizing any low-energy effective description as the low-energy limit of string theory. In recent years, however, an increasing amount of evidences suggests that not all low-energy effective field theories can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. The space of seemingly consistent quantum field theories that cannot be ultraviolet completed with gravity is known as the swampland. In this talk, I will review some conjectured properties of quantum gravity that distinguishes the landscape from the swampland and discuss their cosmological implications. If time permits, I will briefly sketch some arguments that have been presented to give evidences to these conjectures.

Title: The Maps Inside Your Head

Abstract: How do our brains make sense of a complex and unpredictable world? In this talk, I will discuss a physicist's approach to the neural topography of information processing in the brain. First, I will review the brain's architecture and how neural circuits map out the sensory and cognitive worlds. Then, I will describe how highly complex sensory and cognitive tasks are carried out by the cooperative action of many specialized neurons and circuits, each of which has a simple function. I will illustrate my remarks with one sensory example and one cognitive example. For the sensory example, I will consider the sense of smell ("olfaction"), whereby humans and other animals distinguish vast arrays of odor mixtures using very limited neural resources. For the cognitive example, I will consider the "sense of place", that is how animals mentally represent their physical location. Both examples demonstrate that brains have evolved neural circuits that exploit sophisticated principles of mathematics – principles that scientists have only recently discovered.

Description: Weekly string theory journal club with paper discussion and talk by a group member. Papers can be posted here.

Talk: Antonio Rotundo: Scattering at Ultraplanckian Energies