Talks

To do things together it is not enough to know. We must know what others know, and know that they know we know it, a phenomenon known as Common Knowledge. From the Royal Society to the Science and Nature super-journals, scientists have found ways—however flawed—to achieve it. I’ll introduce the concept of the Artifact, an abstraction that captures the essence of these institutions, and that may help us, in the 21st Century, to go beyond them. And I’ll propose, playfully, a few endeavors that may help us achieve it: Data Mists, Blockchain Republics, and the Moon Shot.

The mathematical definition of Coulomb branches of 3d N=4 gauge theories gives ring objects in the equivariant derived Satake category. We have another fundamental example of a ring object, namely the regular sheaf. It corresponds to the 3d N=4 QFT T[G], studied by Gaiotto-Witten. We also have operations on ring objects, corresponding to products, restrictions, Coulomb/Higgs gauging in the `category' of 3d N=4 QFT's. Thus we conjecture that arbitrary 3d N=4 QFT with G-symmetry gives rise a ring object in the derived Satake for G.