Steffen Gielen and I just put our new paper on “observer space” on the arxiv:
S. Gielen and D. Wise, Lifting General Relativity to Observer Space
Then, today I gave the International Loop Quantum Gravity Seminar on the same topic. This a seminar between various institutions, mainly in North America and Europe, where people work on loop quantum gravity and related topics. It’s run the old-fashioned way, as a conference call.
I was a bit uneasy about volunteering for such a talk. I don’t like phones. I’m happy to speak in front of any audience I can see — but an audience I can’t see is a little intimidating, even if I do probably know most of them. Besides, on the phone, you never know whether someone might be recording your conversation, hoping to use it against you later. And in this case, they were! Here’s the audio to my talk in aiff or wav format. If you decide to listen to that, you might also want to look at the slides to my talk.
Seriously, I think the talk turned out rather well — except for the part where my Skype connection to the phone bridge cut out, and I didn’t even know it. Fortunately, though, as I only found out after the talk, Steffen took over, explaining to the audience the same stuff that I was simultaneously, unwittingly, explaining into a black hole. Steffen had never seen the slides, and described this as his first experience with live Powerpoint karaoke. I think he did an excellent job of filling in.
I’ll have to explain a bit more about “observer space” on this blog sometime later…
3 October 2012 at 09:36 |
“I was simultaneously, though unwittingly, explaining to a dead microphone” this is the price to pay when we live in an “observer space” ;-)
I really like this idea of “observer space”, this is close to what I have in mind for years, and I was also charmed by the way Cartan geometry explains MM theory, the synergy of the two is an exciting area!
3 October 2012 at 13:58 |
Thanks — I’m pretty excited by these ideas myself right now! MacDowell-Mansouri gravity is the reason I first got interested in Cartan geometry. It’s a very cool way to understand spacetime geometry! But, I think it’s just scratching the surface. Cartan geometry is a deep subject, and I think lots of it can be used to improve our understanding of gravity.
3 October 2012 at 18:36 |
Totally agree, more work should be done in the direction of the Erlangen program and Cartan geometry, and why not, using the language of categories. For my part I’m in self-training period since I read your article on the MM theory and Cartan geometry (which I thank you by the way)
8 October 2012 at 22:07 |
Jeffrey Morton just wrote a blog article about observer space. You can read it here:
http://theoreticalatlas.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/observer-space-cartan-gr/