As one of the key activities of the 2020 Shanghai Science and Technology Festival, the “Ask-Tao” Forum (a forum which aims at pursuing the truth of science and delivering it to the public) of Tsung-Dao Lee Institute (TDLI) debuted on the 53rd floor of the Shanghai Tower on the morning of the 26th of August, 2020. Through online synchronous live broadcasting, the forum has attracted more than 320,000 visitors.
With the theme of “Derivative Emergence – the secret ingredients in Physics that make our world affluent and interesting”, this forum was lectured by Professor Wei Ku, Deputy Director of TDLI, and hosted by Mr Xu Dong, a renowned science and technology program host of the Shanghai Radio Station.
What we used to believe is that we can understand everything about the world once the basic interaction is understood. Later, we realized that as the system becomes increasingly complicated, some novel phenomena will spring up spontaneously. In the lecture, Professor Wei Ku first introduced the basic concepts of derivative emergence, and pointed out that physical laws are never fixed and unchangeable. This is especially true when the energy scale of a system changes from high energy to low energy, due to collective behavior the effective physical laws at low energy differentiates from those at high energy, meanwhile the physical scale of the system also changes accordingly. Such behavior resembles many of the social phenomena, where the behavior pattern of the community as a whole cannot be inferred directly from that of an individual. As derivative emergent phenomena can occur with numerous possibilities at different energy scales, they demonstrates great vitality, and contain physical laws that are closely related to our daily living, therefore they are extremely worth studying.
In the discussion session, Professor Wei Ku, along with TDL Fellows Kun Liu, Jianda Wu and Chi Ming Yim, as well as Rong Yu, Professor of Renmin University of China and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of TDLI, discussed and shared their research experience and achievements on derivative emergence from different perspectives including particle and quantum physics. They also exchanged their ideas on the development goals and directions of Physics, as well as the relationship between experiment and theory.
In the Q&A session, scholars answered questions raised by the live and online audiences. They emphasized the importance of experiment in Physics, and regarded experiment as the fundamental driving force of its future development.
The 2020 Shanghai Science and Technology Festival was launched in the Shanghai Exhibition Center on the 23rd of August, 2020. Taking this festival as an opportunity, TDLI has specially planned a series of popular science forums, with its aim to share the cutting-edge achievements, explore research methods, and enlighten scientific research wisdom for the audiences in this festival and more others in the future. Renowned Chinese physicist, Honorary Director of TDLI Professor Tsung-Dao Lee named this lecture series as “Ask-Tao” with his personal inscription. “Tao” is a noun used by the Chinese nation for understanding nature, meaning the orbit and track of all things, or the laws of movement or change of all things. The “Ask-Tao” Forum reflects the dedication of our scientists in TDLI to explaining the mystery of science using the simplest language to the general public. It also represents our continuous pursuit of frontier science, as well as of the most fundamental and profound truth.
Video Link：
https://wx.vzan.com/live/tvchat-188431272?shareuid=333542616&vprid=0&sharetstamp=1598243477133#/