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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
What if the world you take for granted around you, the air you
breathe, the buildings, the trees, the universe, the very space
and time you occupy were not real? Not “not real” as in a
dream but “not real” as in not fundamental, not a permanent
stage on which the cosmology of the universe unfolds. What if
everything we perceive emerged from the billions and billions
of quantum interactions that ultimately and collectively resulted
in the classical world we see around us. Before one ridicules
the idea as the philosophical ramblings of idle academics, it is
worth noting that precisely this picture leads to the emergent
macroscopic behaviour of water from its underlying microscopic,
molecular constituents and more and more evidence points
to a very similar picture of human intelligence as an emergent
phenomenon arising from the billions and billions of interactions
in the intricate synaptic circuitry of the human brain.
T
hese questions of the fundamentality of space, time, geometry and topology are
exactly the kind of mind-bending mental gymnastics that occupy researchers in
the newly formed Laboratory for Quantum Gravity and Strings (QGaSLAB). Located
in UCT’s Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, QGaSLAB forms
the third node of the Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre. The laboratory
is currently headed by Dr Jeff Murugan with affiliate members Dr Amanda Weltman
(joint with CGG) and Dr William Horowitz (joint with UCT’s Department of Physics).
They are joined by Dr Jonathan Shock, recently recruited from the Max Planck
Institute for Gravitational Physics in Munich, Germany.
In addition to faculty members, QGaSLAB includes current postdoctoral research fellows
Dr Per Sundin (Claude Leon Fellow, formerly of Humboldt University) and Dr Michael
Abbott (formerly of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research), Dr Sugumi Kanno
(joining from Tufts University in late 2013 and joint with ACGC), as well as two PhD
students, three MSc students and two honours students. The group is one of only two
string theory groups in South Africa and is already well recognised internationally. It is
currently, together with the University of the Witwatersrand and CERN, one of the only
non-EU members of the EU COST network grant “The String Theory Universe”.
Research in the group is focused on four major themes: integrability, the emergence of
spacetime, strongly coupled Quantum Field Theory and string theoretic physics.
The Laboratory for
Quantum Gravity And
Strings