I have just arrived at the ICTS in Bangalore for a three week school/conference on “fundamental problems in quantum physics”. The program looks quite promising with a first week on basic theoretical introductions (where I will admittedly not learn much, except for the course on Trace Dynamics by Tejinder Singh), a second week on experiments (where I will learn a lot, being a rookie on the matter) and a last week of shorter advanced talks. As usual, I will have a model to sell but I am principally interested in having a better view of the field and of what people are doing. I also have a few “foundational” projects I want to write drafts about and I hope the ICTS environment, where such a work is seen favorably, will gently motivate me.

Last week, there was an important conference/school at LMU in Munich simply entitled “Mathematical Foundations of Physics”. A mesmerizing concentrate of the Physics heterodoxy where the deviant becomes momentarily the norm. This event was but an excuse to honor Detlef Dürr, one of most prominent quantum dissidents, who is retiring or, better, “cleverly reallocating intellectual ressources away from teaching and administration”.

It is a difficult task to summarize the content of all the talks, but I think it is worthwhile to give an account of roughly what was discussed. The main focus was on alternative approaches both to Quantum Mechanics and Electrodynamics (classical and quantum) as well as to other mathematical physics problems like many-body dynamics and renormalization group techniques.

Last week, from September 11 to September 17, I was at the DICE 2016 conference in Castiglioncello (Tuscanny). It is a very nice conference which brings together researchers from usually non-overlapping communities. It thus gives a pretty good overview of the different routes physicists are exploring to understand quantum mechanics and possibly unify it with gravity.

Although String Theory was sometimes mentioned (G. Veneziano was a keynote speaker), most of the talks were about other approaches. This probably comes from a deliberate choice of the organizers, whose objective was to give a platform to heterodoxy, and from the fact that String Theory (or Loop Quantum Gravity for that matter) is not a very good tool to understand the subtle effects that could arise in the low energy sector of Newtonian quantum gravity. In this domain, the principal signature of the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity is decoherence. Although the high energy characteristics of gravity such as a discrete spacetime or higher hidden dimensions would presumably have only dim cosmological signatures (and most likely never any testable consequences in accelerators), the decoherence at low energy could soon be probed in experiments (see e.g. the proposals of the group of Oriol Romero-Isart in Innsbruck arxiv, that of the group of Yanbein Chen in Caltech arxiv or that of the group of Angelo Bassi in Trieste arxiv).

I have decided to switch from a standard personal webpage, that has to be migrated everytime I change of institution, to a sort of research log -hosted outside- that will follow me along the years. This is an opportunity to do some outreach and show the subjects I am working on but also to give a researcher’s point of view about a few subjects on the news. There are quite a few good physics blogs out there (e.g. Woit’s, Aaronson’s, Hossenfelder’s), my objective is only to have a slightly improved personal webpage to begin with.