Shape Dynamics: a new tool for General Relativity, Cosmology and Quantum Gravity

by Flavio Mercati

Tuesday 4 Feb 2014, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Paris

I will give an overview of the possibilities offered by a recent reformulation of General Relativity called Shape Dynamics. This theory replaces relativity of simultaneity for spatial conformal invariance, maintaining the same degree of symmetry of GR while doing without some of its shortcomings. In SD several kinds of singularities of GR (like black hole and big-bang type singularities) become unphysical gauge artifacts. Moreover quantum SD is expected to be inequivalent to a standard quantization of GR and appears to be more manageable. Finally, SD offers an original interpretation of the evolution of the Universe in terms of growth of complexity, which could explain the arrow of time without referring to any notion of gravitational entropy and without statistically unlikely initial conditions for the Universe.