Adam Koberinski, Author at New Directions in Philosophy of Cosmology

22Jun 2020 by Adam Koberinski No Comments

What does the cosmological constant problem tell us about effective field theory?

By: Adam Koberinski In the current state of theoretical physics, there are very few clues as to what will be important in building a theory of quantum gravity. Due to the extremely high energies and exotic conditions under which both gravity and quantum effects are known to both be relevant, experimental data on quantum gravity is hard to come by. With little else to guide theoretical work, physicists have often turned to theoretical puzzles for guidance. One of the most well-known puzzles in contemporary quantum gravity research is the cosmological constant problem. This problem arises when one tries to understand the way that vacuum physics in quantum field theory will play a role in gravity. According to the standard account, matter is described by quantum field theory, and even states…

08Jun 2020 by Adam Koberinski No Comments

Interview with Mike Schneider

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Mike Schneider is a PhD candidate at University of California, Irvine. His work spans the philosophy of physics and social epistemology, with a focus on speculative theories of physics. We talked to Mike to learn more about his work and his interest in the New Directions project. Tell us a bit about your background, and what first sparked your interest in cosmology. I've been interested for a long time — since grade school, I think — in the narrative side of science. And cosmology is just about the most grandiose story we feel entitled to tell. So, I think I was nearly always tending toward an interest in cosmology. But, if I had to pinpoint a spark, it was this. My undergraduate physics program was impressively close-knit, and centered around…

02Mar 2020 by Adam Koberinski No Comments

Moving past the swampland: a first philosophical look at the trans-Planckian censorship conjecture

Conference on the Foundations of Cosmology and Quantum Gravity

by Mike D. Schneider In the past several years in string theory, swampland arguments, first developed over a decade ago, have become prominent. This is the gist of the arguments: certain families of four-dimensional effective field theories (EFTs) may fail to reside in the string theoretic landscape, in which case they reside in the swampland. Plausibly, high confidence in the descriptive accuracy of an EFT that resides in the swampland is a knock against the viability of string theory as an adequate theory of quantum gravity. The reason swampland arguments have become prominent in the past several years is primarily due to a conjecture, widely circulated since 2017, that places many models of inflationary dynamics in the swampland. Provided that the conjecture is true, on the interpretation of the swampland…

24Feb 2020 by Adam Koberinski No Comments

Spacetime emerged?

Conference on the Foundations of Cosmology and Quantum Gravity

by: Jingyi Wu and Helen Meskhidze One crucial aspect of the highly celebrated and empirically successful theory of General Relativity (GR) is the metric. The metric simultaneously encodes information about spatial distance and temporal duration. GR provides a relationship between the geometric part of the theory--the spacetime metric-- and the physical part of the theory-- the energy-momentum distribution. Given the success of GR and the crucial role played by the spacetime metric, we expect that it’s important to recover something like the spacetime metric from a quantized theory of gravity (which seemingly lacks a metric structure). The emergence of the metric from various theories of quantum gravity is a current topic of interest and was recently discussed at the Foundations of Cosmology and Quantum Gravity conference in Abu Dhabi in…

14Feb 2020 by Adam Koberinski 1 Comment

Does cosmology need inflation?

Conference on the Foundations of Cosmology and Quantum Gravity

Planck data comparing scale of temperature fluctuations in the CMB with the "multipole moment", related to the angular scale in the sky. Red dots are Planck data points, while the green region is predicted by theory.Credit: Planck collaboration (2015) by Adam Koberinski In January, NYU Abu Dhabi hosted the Conference on the Foundations of Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, a three-day workshop that brought together philosophers and physicists to discuss theories of quantum gravity and how cosmology can provide tests of candidate theories. One major testing ground for theories of quantum gravity is the early universe, where energy densities, and therefore curvature, would have been very high. The current "standard model" of cosmology—the ΛCDM model—is supplemented with a period of inflation to account for the surprising uniformity of temperature in the…