Quantized Ramblings

In this episode, Amartya rambles about an interesting idea of studying inflationary correlators, and we discuss the unreasonable effectiveness of physics in math.

In this episode, we discuss the consequences of having a "time" operator in physical theories and ramble about related ideas.

In this episode, we have our first guest, our good friend Gautam, who rambles about cool stuff from granular gases to superfluids.

In this episode, we talk about an idea central to both condensed matter and particle physics-spontaneous symmetry breaking. Starting from the instructive example of a ferromagnet, we move to the famous Higgs mechanism in the context of gauge theories. We discuss the question of why the Higgs is so light, how the same problem shows up in inflationary cosmology, and the can of worms this 'naturalness' problem opens up- as a reminder of how little are QFTs understood.

In this episode, we discuss the idea of time in physics, inspired by the concept in the movie, Arrival. We ramble about general covariance in relativity, choosing space-like hypersurfaces in cosmology, the metric signature and how despite its supposed arbitrariness, the time co-ordinate stands out. 

In this episode, we discuss the interesting ideas of spontaneous compactification of higher dimensions in theories like string theory, the Kaluza-Klein picture, etc. We then ramble about aspects of bulk-boundary correspondence and topological invariants in condensed matter physics.

In this episode, we discuss various ideas to understand what "temperature" is. Usually a statistical parameter describing equilibrium systems, we try to look for a more general description, which leads to a discussion of black holes and quantum field theory.  

In this episode, we (Chetan, Amartya, and Santhosh) discuss some random ideas about quantum field theories, which range from hidden structures/symmetries, RG flows, anomalies to ideas about condensed matter physics.