"What is life?" annual lecture 2024
The annual "What is life?" lecture, "Anatomy of Big Algebras", will be given by Prof. Tamás Hausel of ISTA on Tuesday November 5th at 5:30pm in the Physics Large Lecture theatre in the Fitzgerald Building, TCD. The talk is organised by the school of mathematics, TCD and the Austrian Embassy.
As this is a public talk we ask that people reserve seats via eventbrite.
Abstract: Starting with Schrödinger’s critique of the difficulty of visualising Heisenberg’s matrix quantum physics we will discuss the notion of non-commutative matrices and its use in particle physics via Gell-Mann’s eightfold way describing heavy particles in terms of quarks. Then I will use this background to motivate my recent work on big algebras - commutative avatars of non-commutative matrix representations - and show some visualisation of them to highlight their complex anatomy, shedding some new light on the quantum numbers of the heavy particles in the baryon octet and decuplet.
