Fay Dowker: Past, Present and Future: The Science of Time

English version of video Geneva, 17 May 2018 Talk by Fay Dowker, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London Dedicated to the memory of Professor Stephen Hawking “The question of the nature of time has been part of human intellectual exploration of our world throughout recorded history. Time both attracts and repels investigation: attracts because there is nothing more fundamental to our subjective experience than its temporality and repels because time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. I will explain what our current best scientific theory about time, General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, tells us about its nature. I will explain how it does justice, beautifully, to one aspect of our experience of time, its subjectivity. I will argue that General Relativity accords better with our experience than the Newtonian concept of time. I will also describe why there is no place in General Relativity for another aspect of time — our experience that it passes! There are indications, however, that future advances in physics, a theory of quantum gravity, may achieve some coordination with our experience of the passage of time.” Fay Dowker Fay Dowker is a British Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. She conducts research in a number of areas of theoretical physics including quantum gravity and causal set theory. As a student, she was interested in wormholes and quantum cosmology. She was awarded the Tyson Medal in 1987 for her work in Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD on space-time wormholes in 1990 with Stephen Hawking. Welcome by Professor Marcel Weber, Director of the Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva Introduction by Professor Christian Wüthrich, Geneva Symmetry Group, Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva With a simultaneous translation into English of the welcoming words by Professor Weber