Science Colloquium
Einstein Gravity Emerging from Spontaneous Conformal Symmetry Breaking
Ariel Edery
Bishop's University
Friday, October 27, 2006
12:30 - 1:20 PM
Hamilton Room 302
This talk is based on an idea I had during my postdoc days at McGill to incorporate spontaneous symmetry breaking into gravitation. The idea lingered in my mind for years until a breakthrough this year. Together with my collaborators, Luca Fabbri (INFN, University of Bologna, Italy) and Manu Paranjape (University of Montreal), we showed that a theory with conformal symmetry, one that does not start off looking like General Relativity at all, can emerge as Einstein's gravity when the symmetry is spontaneously broken. I will explain what is conformal symmetry, what it means for a theory to be spontaneously broken and how both can be incorporated into a theory of gravity.
