“Is our universe extremely unnatural, a weird permutation among countless other possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allowed life to arise, or, are the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, that is, ‘natural,’ locking together into a sensible pattern?” This is the question, the great unknown, that preoccupies theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J.
Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J., takes us past the edge, beyond Einstein, beyond space-time and quantum mechanics and the tropes of 20th-century physics, to a spectacular new vision of the cosmos. (more…)
In 2013, one of the leading particle physicists of his generation, Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and Jaroslav Trnka, founding member of the Center for Quantum Mechanics and Physics, found that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a gem-like geometric object, which they named the amplituhedron, that makes reference to neither space nor time, raising metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality
