Vlatko Vedral, Quantum physicist at the University of Oxford talking about "Building a theory of everything", on the Cosmos Stage, at New Scientist Live 2019


Quantum mechanics is commonly said to be a theory of microscopic things: molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, though recent experiments are throwing this view into question. Gravity, however, seems different in that it is virtually irrelevant in the micro world, and it only becomes important for massive objects such as planets, stars, galaxies and beyond. Because it seems that the domains of quantum mechanics and gravity are very different, all existing quantum gravity proposals share the same problem. Their predictions are extremely hard to test in practice. In this talk, Vlatko Vedral takes you on a tour of the micro and macro worlds and experiments testing their limits. He explains why quantum gravity is so hard to test and describes ingenious new ways to circumvent the problems. Vlatko Vedral has published over 300 research papers on various topics in quantum physics and quantum computing. He has given numerous invited plenary and public talks in the last 25 years of his career. He was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007 and the World Scientific Medal and Prize in 2009 and was elected a Fellow of IOP in 2017. He has held many visiting professorships, among which are those held at the Universities of Vienna, Singapore (NUS), Belo Horizonte and at Perimeter Institute in Canada. He is the author of 4 textbooks and two popular books. Vlatko gives regular interviews to the media and has written for New Scientist, Scientific American and major UK and overseas newspapers. Vlatko Vedral FInstP is a Serbian-born (and naturalised British citizen) physicist and Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is known for his research on the theory of Entanglement and Quantum Information Theory. As of 2017 he has published over 280 research papers in quantum mechanics and quantum information.


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Location: ExCel London, One Western Gateway, Royal Victoria Dock,
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