Emily Adlam

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1,263 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 20 Jul

Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam: Reality Is a Completed Puzzle, Not a Flowing River · 11 Apr 2025 podcast

Yes.

Uh so

In that paper, um, you know, this is sort of an exploratory paper, I'm not

necessarily committed to the view that we know that reductionism is false, but I'm interested in whether that is maybe one way to try to resolve some of the the problems that we encounter in quantum field theory.

Um, you know, so one of the problems is a sort of fine-tuning issue where we we find that uh in s in certain kinds of cases, it seems that the values of two distinct fundamental constants must be very carefully adjusted to fit each other uh in order to produce the observed value of uh the constant at a higher scale.

Um and sort of the observation I was making here was that if you s if you say things are the other way around, if you say that the higher level constant i is fundamental and the smaller scale uh

con constants are in fact derived from it, that gives you a very natural explanation for why they're they're fine-tuned in this way, because they are in fact fixed by the actual value of the higher level constant.

So the thought there was just that perhaps changing our way of thinking such that that in some cases smaller scale things are explained by larger scale things rather than vice versa might be a way of understanding some of those phenomena.

So then uh

it was important to look at the renormalization transformations because renormalization is the the transformation we use in quantum field theory to move between different scales.

And so the question I was looking at there was trying to understand

Given the mathematical structure of the renormalization translations, is it possible to t that things could be reversed in direction and that the higher scale things could define the lower scale things and not vice versa?

We normally wouldn't think that's possible on in sort of more ordinary physics because we think there's a sort of many-to-one mapping where many microscopic possibilities get mapped to one macroscopic possibility.

So the macroscopic possibility can't determine what's going on in the microscopic scales.

But renormalization is in fact a one-to-one trans transformation.

So it does seem more plausible in the kind of regime where that's that's relevant that perhaps the higher scale things could determine the lower.

scale things because of the specific mathematical structure of that transformation.

Even at fixed points?

Uh so fixed points are somewhat more complicated because fixed points do involve scenarios where many solutions get mapped to one solution.

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