Gr.IV seminar: Níckolas de Aguiar Alves (Scuola Normale Superiore) - "Could frogs teach us something about quantum gravity?".

Wednesday Oct 21, 2026, 4:00 PM → 5:00 PM Europe/Rome

0M03

A frog sits in a quiet bog. It starts to croak, and the sound moves the air molecules around it. When the frog stops croaking, these molecules might not return to their original positions. This new "memory effect" is completely analogous to predictions made in general relativity in the 1970s and in electrodynamics in the 2010s. None of these predictions has been experimentally tested yet. Therefore, the acoustic case provides an alternative route for experimental investigation. The analogy is further deepened by rewriting acoustics in terms of a Kalb--Ramond two-form field, which displays that---just like gravity and electrodynamics---linear acoustics has asymptotic symmetries associated with this memory effect, and a soft theorem as well. Based on arXiv: 2512.15796 [hep-th].