The beauteous Aphrodite, she of the wondrous form, took shape and emerged, fully made in her perfection, out of the foam. The notion of spacetime as foam dates from ideas put forward by John Wheeler of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study during the 1960's. The Aphrodite project aims to dive deep into the broth of geometrical fluctuations and give perfect shape to that which was formless.

This project explores the structure of spacetime at the Planckian scale. The Planck length is the smallest naturally occurring measurement used by scientists: about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a centimetre. It is at this scale those quantum phenomena and the arena — or the topology in which they occur — emerge as they are observed.

The task here is to provide a mathematical solution to this physical problem. There is no desire to give up Einsteinian relativity; it presents a very good working model, in its domain of application. But at the sub-Planckian scale, Einstein's theory cannot even be tested. Because it is not testable, the notion of pre-existing spacetime is swept away and may be replaced by an appropriate quantum observable–an entity whose values at the moment it is measured.

Then care is taken to make this work compatible with existing working theories such as relativity, so that the beautiful Aphrodite may be safe wherever she roams.

 

Projects held in Starlab, Brussels

Aphrodite - Spacetime Foam
Undo - Topology Leaps

Quantum Topology | Spacetime Foam | Recent Activities | Curriculum Vitae