Professor Fay Dowker

Fay Dowker tells the story of general relativity and its interactions with Newtonian physics, from Galileo to cutting edge research on the granularity of spacetime. 

Imperial hosted talks by Professors Fay Dowker and Jerome Gauntlett as part of the international celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's Field Equations defining the Theory of General Relativity.

Theories of Everything Podcast featuring Professor Fay Dowker on Causal Set Theory, Quantum Gravity, Consciousness, Non-Locality and Stephen Hawking

“The question of the nature of time has been part of human intellectual exploration of our world throughout recorded history. Time both attracts and repels investigation: attracts because there is nothing more fundamental to our subjective experience than its temporality and repels because time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. 

I will explain what our current best scientific theory about time, General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, tells us about its nature. I will explain how it does justice, beautifully, to one aspect of our experience of time, its subjectivity. I will argue that General Relativity accords better with our experience than the Newtonian concept of time. I will also describe why there is no place in General Relativity for another aspect of time — our experience that it passes! There are indications, however, that future advances in physics, a theory of quantum gravity, may achieve some coordination with our experience of the passage of time.” Fay Dowker 

Professor Fay Dowker presents her Inaugural Lecture.

Two major scientific developments - relativity and quantum theory - have advanced our understanding of the physical world. However, despite their success in predicting experimental results, they remain revolutions in waiting. I will argue that the full potential of these discoveries will only be realised when they are brought together into a unified whole. The revolution that general relativity represents - the replacement of three-dimensional space with four-dimensional space-time as both stage and actor in the universe's grand play - has so far been only partially incorporated into the scientific practice of fundamental physics.

Taking space-time seriously, as general relativity demands, means adopting the Dirac-Feynman 'sum-over-histories' approach to quantum theory and gives us our best chance of discovering a theory of quantum gravity, a framework for all of physics.

Fay Dowker speaks at a Perimeter Institute Public Lecture on November 2, 2011.
Black holes are hot! This discovery made by Stephen Hawking ties together gravity, spacetime, quantum matter, and thermal systems into the beautiful and exciting science of "Black Hole Thermodynamics". Its beauty lies in the powerful way it speaks of the unity of physics. The excitement arises because it tells us that there is something lacking in our understanding of spacetime and, at the same time, gives us a major clue as to what the missing ingredient should be. Theoretical physicists at Perimeter Institute and elsewhere are pioneering a proposal, known as Causal Set Theory, for the structure held by these most fundamental atoms of spacetime.

In this talk, Professor Dowker describes black hole thermodynamics and argue that it is telling us that spacetime itself is granular or "atomic" at very tiny scales.

Public debate where Prof. Dowker argues that the path integral (or sum over histories) approach to quantum mechanics provides a One World interpretation