Watch Roger Penrose: Twistor Theory in a Cosmological Setting Documentary Online


Twistor theory provides a non-local formalism for physics which is particularly well suited (though not exclusively) to conformally invariant physics.

Thus, massless particles in Minkowski space and, for example, the high-energy limit of strong-interaction physics (of considerable relevance to LHC) are situations where twistors are particularly valuable. Yet there remain deep problems (to do with mass, gravitational interactions, etc.). The observational input from cosmology that there appears to be a positive cosmological constant (or equivalent) suggests a modification of the standard Poincare-invariant twistor theory to one in which there is a complex symplectic structure.

This leads to a new perspective on asymptotic twistors and the “googly problem” in a general cosmological setting.

TWISTORS: In theoretical and mathematical physics, twistor theory is a mathematical theory mapping the geometric objects of conventional 3+1 space-time (Minkowski space) into geometric objects in a 4 dimensional space with metric signature (2,2). This space is called twistor space, and its complex valued coordinates are called “twistors.” Twistor theory was first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1967, as a possible path to a theory of quantum gravity. The twistor approach is especially natural for solving the equations of motion of massless fields of arbitrary spin. In 2003, Edward Witten proposed to marry twistor and string theory by embedding the topological B model of string theory in twistor space. His objective was to model certain Yang-Mills amplitudes.


Part 001




Part 002




Note: The first part of the lecture of Roger Penrose starts right after the end of Georg Wikman’s lecture and ends before the end of the video. As a result, the period for Dr. Penrose’s lecture in this video is from 15m15s to about 1h00min.