Geometry and Physics Seminar: Theo Johnson-Freyd

The usual Atiyah--Segal "functorial" description of quantum field theory corresponds to the "Schrodinger picture" in quantum mechanics.  I will describe a slight modification that corresponds to the "Heisenberg picture", which I will argue is better physically motivated.  The example I am most interested in is a version of quantum Chern--Simons theory that does not require the level to be quantized; it provides a neat packaging of pretty much all objects of skein theory.