Questions, Answers, and Paradoxes in Fundamental Physics

Nima Arkani-Hamed, described by ICTP director Fernando Quevedo as the "most-inspiring" theoretical physicist of our times, took stage as the first speaker invited to lecture at ICTP's new Salam Lecture Series. Talking to a capacity audience, Arkani-Hamed delivered information, energy and enthusiasm while delving into details about the "Past, Present, and Future of Fundamental Physics".

The talk was the first of five that Arkani-Hamed is delivering during the week for the new lecture series.

He started his lecture by saying that it is "an incredibly exciting time in fundamental physics" because of our mature understanding of the subject on one hand and very sharp and clearly important paradoxes in our theoretical understanding of the way the world works on the other hand.

Giving his audience a panoramic view of 400 years of physics in his first lecture, Arkani-Hamed provided insights into the various concepts that have dominated the world of fundamental physics at different points in history. "Everything that we have learned [over the past 400 years] can be subsumed with a basic slogan, and the slogan is that of unification," he said. "More and more disparate phenomena turn out to be different aspects of the same thing." "Physics," he stressed "forces you to remove artificial distinction between disciplines."

In his second lecture, Arkani-Hamed looked at the possible challenges and the open questions that will drive the development of fundamental physics in the 21st century. One main theme of his talk was questions in physics in the context of space-time. "We suspect that space-time is not a fundamental notion and has to emerge from more primitive building blocks," he said before taking the audience through how physics has been moving through the classical deterministic world to the quantum probabilistic world, and now to a quantum world including gravity with loss of local observables.

In his third lecture, scheduled for Wednesday 1 February at 16:30 (+1 GMT), Arkani-Hamed will be looking at what he calls "the deeply mystifying question" of why there is a macroscopic universe. The talk will  take place in the main lecture hall of ICTP and will be streamed live.