Unification and universality

Thursday, 6. March, 11:00 h, KGII-Audimax

Much of the philosophical discussion about unification in physics focuses the reduction of phenomena to elementary particles/fundamental forces and the theories that enable us to accomplish this. There is however another aspect to unification in physics that is equally important but much less discussed (at least by philosophers), namely, the use of the renormalization group (RG) to establish similarities among the behaviour of different kinds of phenomena at a critical point. My talk will examine some of these issues and offer some reasons why we ought to think of RG methods as more than just a mathematical technique but rather as providing us with physical insights into the phenomena it treats; insights that illustrate a new way of thinking about unification in physics.

Margaret Morrison
University of Toronto