Invitation to a talk by Frederic Schuller on Monday, January 29th 2018, 12:00 h

To which question is gravity actually the answer?

That gravity is indeed an answer to a particular theoretical question — and not simply just another model of one of the four forces — can be understood starting from local matter field dynamics, as long as the latter is canonically quantizable.
The surprising key result is that the common canonical evolution, of matter and geometry, completely determines not only the kinematical meaning of geometric backgrounds, but also their dynamical evolution. This notably includes very exotic backgrounds.

Being able to consider matter coupling to geometries far beyond Lorentzian metrics is not too bad a perspective, in face of our having detailed knowledge of of only 4.6\% of the matter-energy dynamics (including their geometric background) in the universe. And not a new perspective either, considering that it was the dynamics of the classical electromagnetic field which single-handedly led Einstein to the identification and kinematical interpretation of Lorentzian geometries and finally the current gravitational field equations.

The talk will be aimed at a broad audience of theoretical physicists.