Speaker:Dr David Tong (DAMTP)
Venue: Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College
Time: 25/10/2010 20:30, drinks from 20:15

Leopold Kronecker once said “God made the integers, the rest is the work of man”. In this talk I will show that this statement is experimentally wrong. I will explain how the integers arise in Nature and explain that they are emergent objects, no more fundamental than the concept of smell. I will also comment on the yet-to-be-discovered laws of physics and provide some (admittedly circumstantial) evidence that they are not based on the integers. We are not living in the world of “The Matrix”. (Probably).