The traditional Sciama SISSA Colloquium returns later this month, October 19th, at 5 p.m. in room 128-129, with a seminar by Theodore A. Jacobson of the University of Maryland.
Gravitation and the quantum vacuum
Abstract: 50 years ago Bekenstein introduced the strange notion of black hole entropy to save the second law of thermodynamics, and Hawking's discovery of black hole radiation revealed that this entropy arises from the quantum vacuum. In this talk I'll explain the entropy of the vacuum, and how vacuum thermodynamics leads to Einstein's law of gravitation governing the curvature of the spacetime metric, as well as why the ultimate melding of gravity and the quantum vacuum is not yet fully understood.
Ted Jacobson has had numerous research interests, including quantum gravity, Hawking radiation, analog condensed matter models of Hawking radiation, black hole entropy and Lorentz symmetry violation in particle physics and gravitation.
He has been awarded the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. In 2018 he was appointed Distinguished University Professor of UMD.
The Sciama SISSA colloquium is named in memory of Dennis Sciama, one of the most important cosmologists of the 20th century, and for many years a pillar of the astrophysics field at SISSA.
A reception outside room 128 will follow the event.
Image: AI (Stable Diffusion) generated painting of a supermassive black hole in the style of Leonid Afremov