Category: 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…

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…