“Our team aims to create a new mathematical language”, said Johannes Henn, the coordinating principal investigator of the project. “The goal is to describe physical phenomena on all scales, from the interactions of elementary particles to the large-scale structure of the Universe.”
Spacetime and quantum mechanics lie at the heart of physics, and have led to a spectacularly successful understanding of the laws of Nature. However, these pillars of fundamental physics are expected to be only approximate notions that ultimately must arise from more basic concepts. This is seen most dramatically at the Big Bang singularity, where the notion of a smooth spacetime breaks down.
Recently, novel geometric shapes called “positive geometries" were discovered in the data describing the scattering of elementary particles and the correlated positions of cosmological structures on the sky. “We believe that these positive geometries have caught the tiger by the tail," says Nima Arkani-Hamed, “giving us the first concrete examples of the way in which the principles of space-time and quantum mechanics can arise from more basic mathematical principles."
So far, however, these positive geometries have only been found in simplified toy models of the physical world. The aim of the UNIVERSE+ collaboration is to fully understand and expose these new ideas, and to find the geometries relevant to the real world, including gravity and the expanding universe.
