Professor Fay Dowker presents her Inaugural Lecture.
Two major scientific developments – relativity and quantum theory – have advanced our understanding of the physical world. However, despite their success in predicting experimental results, they remain revolutions in waiting.
I will argue that the full potential of these discoveries will only be realised when they are brought together into a unified whole. The revolution that general relativity represents – the replacement of three-dimensional space with four-dimensional space-time as both stage and actor in the universe’s grand play – has so far been only partially incorporated into the scientific practice of fundamental physics.
Taking space-time seriously, as general relativity demands, means adopting the Dirac-Feynman ‘sum-over-histories’ approach to quantum theory and gives us our best chance of discovering a theory of quantum gravity, a framework for all of physics.
Biography
Fay Dowker is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.
She did her PhD with Professor Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. She has done postdoctoral work in the USA at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Barbara and California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. She held a lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London before moving to Imperial.
Her research interests are quantum gravity, especially causal set theory, and the foundations of quantum mechanics.