Some Open Problems in Fundamental Physics

Topic : Some Open Problems in Fundamental Physics

Summary:
In his famous Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in 1900, Lord Kelvin talked about “two clouds” on the physics horizon:
1. The first one involved the question, how could the earth move through an elastic solid, such as essentially is the luminiferous ether?
2 . The second is the Maxwell-Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of energy”. He was bang on. The first cloud dissipated with the discovery of special relativity, while the second one owes its disappearance to quantum mechanics.
Are there any clouds on the physics horizon now? It seems that both relativity and quantum physics have withstood the test of time and have showed no experimental deviations for over a century. But their successes are, Dr. Vedral believes, coming to an end. Dr. Vedral would like to channel Lord Kelvin and discuss some current problems in our fundamental theories of physics but from the viewpoint of a quantum information theorist. Among them are
1. the universality of quantum superpositions (i.e., can anything be superposed?);
2. the status of the quantum principle of local tomography (i.e., are measurements on individual quantum systems sufficient to reveal entanglement?);
3. the status of potentials in fundamental interactions (e.g., is the Aharonov-Bohm effect really non-local?).
The big questions and potential two new clouds -that are related to the bridge between the physics of micro and the physics of macro are

1. is gravity quantum?
2. can dark energy and matter be understood within the standard model? If we are lucky, perhaps these new clouds will also lead us to new theories in physics.

Bio:
Vlatko Vedral (PhD and BSc at Imperial College) is a professor of quantum information at University of Oxford. He has published over 400 research papers on various topics in quantum physics and quantum computing and is one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers. He has given numerous invited plenary and public talks during his career. These include a specialised talk at a Solvay meeting (2010) and a popular one at the International Safe Scientifique (2007). He was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007, the World Scientific Medal and Prize in 2009, the Marko Jaric Award in 2010 and was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2017 and a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2020. He is consulting the World Economic Forum on the Future of Computation. Vlatko is the author of 4 textbooks and 2 popular books (“Decoding Reality” and “From Micro to Macro”). He gives regular interviews to the media and is actively engaged in popularization of physics also by writing for New Scientist, Scientific American and major UK and overseas newspapers.

Moderator: Pawel Gora, CEO of Quantum AI Foundation