- Speaker
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Slava Rychkov, Ph.D.Permanent Professor, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Scientists love to reduce physical systems to a few elementary blocks, which they use like Lego building blocks to build more complicated ‘composite’ objects. Geoffrey Chew in the 1960s hypothesized, in connection with high-energy physics, a different type of situation. In this scenario, there are infinitely many particles, all of them equally elementary (or equally composite). The particles mutual existence is forced by tight requirements of self-consistency. He called this scheme ‘bootstrap,’ referring to a magical act of lifting oneself by one’s shoes.
In this lecture, Slava Rychkov will explain how the ‘bootstrap’ idea recently found a concrete realization in the theory of critical phenomena, with the three-dimensional Ising model being the simplest bootstrap system.