On the way to grand unification: ideas and history
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Spain cordially invites you to an online lecture "On the way to grand unification: ideas and history», which continues our new lecture series «Physicists in search for unity in nature". The lecture will be given by Anton Sheikin, theoretical physicist and associate professor at SPbU.
Albert Einstein has devoted more than a half of his life to the search for a unified description of all physical processes. The creation of the grand unified theory, or unified field theory, was not successful. Although, scientists managed to make a lot of discoveries in this field, which changed our traditional perception of the world.
Grand unified theory is a "Holy Grail" of contemporary physics; several generations of scientists have been eagerly searching for it for many years. Einstein himself daydreamed about unified field theory, for the searching of supersymmetry, which makes possible to unify interactions, one of the most ambitious experimental facilities was constructed — Large Hadron Collider.
However, even before grand unification in the field of physics there were a lot of unifications: electricity and magnetism, gravitation and inertia, terrestrial and celestial mechanics etc.
Why physicists are so eager to unify everything? What advantages do they gain from such unifications? And which unifications are we to expect in the future? This and more will be discussed in our next lecture.
Lecturer
Anton Sheikin is a senior lecturer at the SPbU Department of High Energy and Elementary Particle Physics. Winner of the 2021 Russian Society "Knowledge" Award in the "Teacher — Educator of the Year" category, Sheikin teaches physics and popularises science. His research interests focus on gravity and geometric methods in physics.
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s first university.