Emergence, fundamentality and quantum properties of spacetime in asymptotically safe quantum gravity

This video is part of the PROTEUS project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 758145)

Abstract

I try to provide a short introduction to the subject of asymptotic safety tailored to an audience of historians of physics, philosophers of physics, or physicists who are working on unrelated topics. Most of my efforts are meant to convey the special conceptual perspective on modern theoretical physics that (I believe) characterizes the community working on asymptotically safe quantum gravity or in the more general topic of Wilsonian renormalizability in high-energy physics. Therefore a large part of this introduction will have the form of a lecture, which defines the key concepts used by the physicists, and motivates them from a historical and philosophical point of view (I refer here to a rather mundane kind of philosophy, which is practiced by physicists at conference dinners to defend their own wishes and beliefs). Finally, in the last part of this introduction, I will comment on the consequences of this conceptual point of view on the topic of emergence/fundamentality of (space-)time, and I will review the current status of the asymptotically safe program in quantum gravity.