Speaker
Description
Although extremely successful in their domains of description, general relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics rest on very different conceptual foundations, making it extremely difficult to describe phenomena involving gravity and high energies, such as black holes. The talk will provide a brief description of the most popular approaches to quantum gravity being investigated and will show how philosophical arguments can be applied in contexts where very different alternative research programs coexist in theoretical physics. Focusing on the concept of spacetime emergence, it will be shown that even in the absence of a complete theory of quantum gravity, one can already draw interesting implications regarding the nature of spacetime, for example such as whether spacetime could have failed to exist according to the laws of nature.
