A warm welcome to everybody to this week's seminar at the Chair of Dynamics, Control

and Numerics at FAU Erlangen.

We are very happy to have Professor Paul Steinmann as today's speaker.

He is the head of the Institute of Applied Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical

Engineering at FAU, as well as the director of the Glasgow Computational Engineering Centre

at the University of Glasgow.

And today he will give a talk on configurational mechanics.

Please Professor Steinmann, the virtual stage is yours.

We are looking forward to your talk.

Yeah, thank you a lot for the introduction and also thanks a lot for having me in your

seminar.

I feel very privileged and honoured.

And I chose a topic to report on that keeps me busy literally for the past 25 years, I

can say.

And that is the topic of configurational mechanics.

And I will try to share with you some of my views on this topic and also some of the perspectives

and promises it holds.

So configurational mechanics is essentially, let's say, a part of continuum mechanics.

So to get going, I therefore would first like to share with you some thoughts on the notion

of a continuum before we get going to the configurational mechanics part.

So if you think about it, then of course, if you think about matter, then basically

we would say, well, matter is discrete, right?

So I have here a picture of Avogadro, and if you just take the number of entities that

we have in one mole of substance, it's this huge number with the 23 zeros.

And then Torsten Perscher, he's already smiling.

If you think of simulating the trajectories of just one mole of substance over a relevant

time span, that is an almost undoable task, I would say.

I just mentioned this in passing.

There are also, of course, people who think about the question whether space itself is

maybe discrete.

And I can mention here our colleague at the FIU, Klaus Mecke, from the physics department,

who is actually building up a theory based on the concept of space consisting only of

discrete points in order to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

Of course, this goes far beyond my capacities.

I'm just mentioning that.

Maybe we can also ask whether time is perhaps also discrete.

OK, to underpin a little bit this with some easy pictures, I just share with you here

from a very fantastic book from the 80s, The Powers of 10, some pictures.

So what we see here at the length scale of 10 to the minus 12 meters is the core of a

carbon atom.

And then if we zoom out by going one dimension higher to 10 to the minus 11, we already see

this little dots is just a representation of the charge distribution that we have due

to the electrons behaving in a quantum manner.

Again, another dimension higher, 10 to the minus 10.

OK, we still see this kind of foc, this electron foc we can maybe say.

And then at 10 to the minus 9 at the scale of nanometers, we can see atoms.

Here we see the carbon atom and attached to its hydrogen atoms.

And then if you further scan out, OK, in this case, we see part of a DNA that consists of

that molecules 10 to the minus 8, 10 to the minus 7.

We still see these coils here.