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The conference "Wave-function collapse as a resolution of a tension between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics" by Sir Roger Penrose, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, was held on 25 September 2019 at the Bruno Touschek Auditorium of the INFN Frascati National Laboratories. During the seminar, professor Penrose illustrated his idea on the possibility of resolving the conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The seminar was organized as part of the workshop "Is quantum theory exact? From quantum foundations to quantum applications" that took place at the INFN Frascati National Laboratories between 23 and 27 September 2019. Roger Penrose is the author of important contributions to the mathematical physics of General Relativity and cosmology. He received numerous prizes and awards, including, in 1988, the Wolf Prize for physics together with Stephen Hawking for the theorems on the singularity of Penrose-Hawking, the Dirac Medal (1989) and the Einstein Medal (1990). We asked him to explain some of the founding ideas of his prolific mathematical thinking.
Professor Penrose, how could General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics be combined?
It’s a common view that we have to make General Relativity subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, because big things are made from small things and quantum mechanics is a theory of the small, while General Relativity is a theory of the large. My view is different: I think Quantum Mechanics needs help. It’s not a fully consistent theory and I’m more concerned with what you might call gravitising Quantum Mechanics than quantising Gravity. There are experiments which will show how Quantum Mechanics needs to be modified to be consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity: that will be an important development in the future.
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At the end of September 2019, the DAMPE (DArk Matter Particle Explorer) experiment, in orbit around the Earth since December 2015, published on Science Advances the direct measurement of the flow of cosmic protons up to high energies, in the range of 100 TeV (approximately 100,000 times the energy corresponding to the ...
The GERDA experiment, at INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS), has achieved another important scientific milestone, reaching a new record in sensitivity in research into the extremely rare neutrinoless double beta decay. If detected, this decay would provide essential information on the nature of neutrinos and on why there is much more matter than antimatter in the current universe. In particular, it would demonstrate that the ...
ExaNeSt, the precursor of an exascale computer all made in Europe, has been successfully tested. Italy is taking part in the project with INFN, the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and a group of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises). High performance computing (HPC) is one of the fundamental pillars of global scientific and technological research and a key factor to support the digital revolution ...
IoTwins was launched in Bologna on 4 September. It is a new European big data project financed to the tune of 20 million Euros. INFN is contributing with both its infrastructure and its know-how to the project. The project’s aim is to create digital twins, or virtual copies of industrial processes, for large scale virtual ...
Hundreds of events all over Italy, nine national projects, more than 100 cities involved, thousands of researchers and a lot of curiosity: these are the main ingredients of the “European Researchers’ Night” that returned this year on the last Friday of September. Held for the first time in 2005, supported by the European Commission, the “white night” of research has ...
NA62: HUNTING OUT THE SECRETS OF THE KAON
In September 2019, at the KAON 2019 conference in Perugia and at a seminar at CERN, in Geneva, the collaboration of the NA62 experiment at CERN, in which INFN physicists and technologists participate, presented its new results on the very rare decay of a charged kaon into a pion, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino. The results show two events recorded in the data gathered by the experiment in 2017 and add to one decay event recorded in the 2016 dataset. In addition to these events, the NA62 collaboration presented new measures, obtained with unprecedented sensitivity, of the decay of a neutral pion into particles that are invisible to the experiment, like neutrinos or not yet known particles. At the moment, the collaboration is analysing the data collected in 2018 and the experiment is getting ready for the new data-acquisition phase that will start in 2021, with an upgrade of the experimental apparatus aimed mainly at the reduction of the background, in order to perform high-precision measurements of the very rare kaon decay. ...
Cover: Graphics taken from a slide of the conference "Wave-function collapse as a resolution of a tension between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics" by Sir Roger Penrose
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