On life, death and radical critique: A non-survival guide to the Brave New Higher Education for the intellectually pregnant

This paper joins the call to arms against the domestication of critique in organisation studies. It argues that we have become too pre-occupied with our professional survival to stand firm against the normalising pressure of the new higher education and its publish-or-perish machinery. We trade away too much radicalism in exchange for legitimacy, which results in widely accepted but toothless forms of critique. The paper draws on two contrasting metaphors of Huxley's Brave New World and intellectual pregnancy to illustrate some of the challenges faced by early-career academics entering the world of the Brave New Higher Education as academic ‘savages’. It discusses the almost imperceptible socialisation of the savage into the ‘rationalised myths’ of the brave new world to the point that alternatives become literally unthinkable. The paper suggests that we can fight this slippage and the associated domestication of critique by giving up our obsession with survival and by remembering/envisioning alternative realities, such as that of intellectual pregnancy deriving from the fragile idealism of the savage's doctoral world

Ising exponents from the functional renormalisation group

We study the 3d Ising universality class using the functional renormalisation group. With the help of background fields and a derivative expansion up to fourth order we compute the leading index, the subleading symmetric and anti-symmetric corrections to scaling, the anomalous dimension, the scaling solution, and the eigenperturbations at criticality. We also study the cross-correlations of scaling exponents, and their dependence on dimensionality. We find a very good numerical convergence of the derivative expansion, also in comparison with earlier findings. Evaluating the data from all functional renormalisation group studies to date, we estimate the systematic error which is found to be small and in good agreement with findings from Monte Carlo simulations, \epsilon-expansion techniques, and resummed perturbation theory.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, 7 table

Resolving Spacetime Singularities within Asymptotic Safety

A key incentive of quantum gravity is the removal of spacetime singularities plaguing the classical theory. We compute the non-perturbative momentum-dependence of a specific structure function within the gravitational asymptotic safety program which encodes the quantum corrections to the graviton propagator for momenta above the Planck scale. The resulting quantum corrected Newtonian potential approaches a constant negative value as the distance between the two point masses goes to zero, thereby removing the classical singularity. The generic nature of the underlying mechanism suggests that it will remain operative in the context of black hole and cosmic singularities.Comment: v2: some improvements and clarifications; version accepted for publication in PR

On avoiding Ostrogradski instabilities within Asymptotic Safety

We study the renormalization group flow of gravity coupled to scalar matter using functional renormalization group techniques. The novel feature is the inclusion of higher-derivative terms in the scalar propagator. Such terms give rise to Ostrogradski ghosts which signal an instability of the system and are therefore dangerous for the consistency of the theory. Since it is expected that such terms are generated dynamically by the renormalization group flow they provide a potential threat when constructing a theory of quantum gravity based on Asymptotic Safety. Our work then establishes the following picture: upon incorporating higher-derivative terms in the scalar propagator the flow of the gravity-matter system possesses a fixed point structure suitable for Asymptotic Safety. This structure includes an interacting renormalization group fixed point where the Ostrogradski ghosts acquire an infinite mass and decouple from the system. Tracing the flow towards the infrared it is found that there is a subset of complete renormalization group trajectories which lead to stable renormalized propagators. This subset is in one-to-one correspondence to the complete renormalization group trajectories obtained in computations which do not track of the higher-derivative terms. Thus our asymptotically safe gravity-matter systems are not haunted by Ostrogradski ghosts.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figure

Geometry of the quantum universe

A universe much like the (Euclidean) de Sitter space-time appears as background geometry in the causal dynamical triangulation (CDT) regularization of quantum gravity. We study the geometry of such universes which appear in the path integral as a function of the bare coupling constants of the theory.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Typos corrected. Conclusions unchange