Public Lecture

Black Holes in Quantum Space-time

Steve Giddings

University of California, Santa Barbara

Wed, Aug 27, 5:30–6:30pm

Flug Forum, Aspen Center for Physics

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The discovery of quantum mechanics a century ago revolutionized our understanding of physical reality, but we have yet to grasp its implications for spacetime.  In Einstein’s general relativity spacetime bends and ripples, but we expect its quantum replacement to be stranger still.  Black holes serve as a crucible for testing quantum implications for spacetime, and yield a crisis of understanding arising from Stephen Hawking’s discovery that quantum effects make them radiate particles and evaporate.  These gravitational phenomena are in tension with notions about how information is localized, and the classical prohibition on it propagating faster than light.  Our newfound ability to observe black hole images and gravitational waves from black holes begin to provide a possible testing ground for some ideas about their quantum spacetime structure.  The ultimate understanding of quantum spacetime will likely involve a more profound revolution than that of quantum mechanics.

Steve Giddings Headshot

About Steve Giddings

Steven Giddings is a quantum physicist who studies questions of the fundamental nature of matter, forces, and spacetime, and behavior of their most extreme manifestations, in black holes and the early universe. He first visited the Aspen Center for Physics as a University of Utah undergraduate in the early 1980s.  He went on to earn his PhD at Princeton in 1987, and was then a postdoc and Junior Fellow at Harvard until 1990.  Since then he has been on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is now a Distinguished Professor.  He has been a visiting researcher at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and CERN.  When not pondering deep mysteries, he enjoys mountain biking, backcountry skiing, climbing, and kayaking, and sometimes attempts to surf.

Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series

Heinz R Pagels was a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, president of the New York Academy of Science, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years, serving as a participant, officer, and trustee. He was also President of the International League for Human Rights. His work on chaos theory inspired the character of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park book and movies. A part-time local resident, Professor Pagels died here in a mountaineering accident in 1988. His family and friends instituted the lecture series in his honor because he devoted a substantial part of his life to effective public dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Heinz Pagels

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