Acesso:
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Resumo: Over the last few years, my collaborators and I been revisiting the foundations of the known laws of fundamental physics. Our goal has been to explain the surprising simplicity of the observed cosmos (on small and large scales) with a minimum of ad hoc ingredients and assumptions. Recently, this approach has met with several surprising successes. We found a new explanation for the flatness, homogeneity and isotropy of the universe on large scales, based only on gravity, thermodynamics, and the hypothesis that the universe does not violate CPT symmetry. The same hypothesis allows a new, more economical explanation of cosmic dark matter: it consists of one of the three massive right-handed neutrinos expected in the standard model. Our picture requires that the fundamental laws of particle physics are unchanged under local scale transformations, or “Weyl“ symmetry. We found a new way to implement this symmetry, without introducing any new particles. It only works if there are exactly three generations of elementary particles, just as observed. The same mechanism generates large-scale primordial density perturbations in the universe, with a calculable amplitude. I will summarise the theory’s key predictions, forthcoming observational tests, and remaining challenges.
Sobre o palestrante: Neil Turok is a South African physicist. He is a director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
