Congratulations to Mike Schneider, the current UIC postdoc, who will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri in January!

Thanks to everyone involved in the Morzine Summer Institute – it was a great success. The program and abstracts (and photos) are linked above (and here https://beyondspacetime.net/2022-summer-institute/), and videos will be posted soon.

The recent talks by Flaminia Giacomini and Anna Ijjas have been posted. See the speakers page, or our YouTube channel.

Please note that Anna Ijjas’ talk on Wednesday will now be zoom only. Details below, and on the speakers page. Please join us virtually!

Please join us in person at UIC, remotely at UNIGE, or online via zoom or YouTube on Wednesday, 6 April (11:15 Chicago time) for a talk by Anna Ijjas (NYU).

Entropy, Black Holes, and the Early Universe. “Emerging from a big bang in which gravity is strongly coupled and quantum fluctuations of stress-energy and spacetime are both large, the natural expectation is that the total entropy should be nearly maximal and equally distributed among both stress-energy and gravitational degrees of freedom. However, the observed entropy distribution on the last scattering surface is puzzlingly different, as Penrose has emphasized. In this talk, I will introduce the cosmological entropy problem and discuss our recent proposal to evade it.”

More information on our Speakers page.

We would like to draw your attention to the following:

Dear Colleagues, 

As researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna (IQOQI-Vienna), Austria, we would like to draw your attention to the opening of two types of grants for scientists from Ukraine:

JESH-Ukraine Emergency Call of the Austrian Academy of Sciences,

Special fellowship program in the fields of mathematics and physics by the Erwin Schrödinger Institute. (the ESI is across the street from IQOQI)

Please follow the instructions in the links to apply for the fellowships.  IQOQI-Vienna is pleased to serve as a host institution for the applicants and is particularly suitable for young researchers in physics working or wishing to work in various aspects of quantum theory, in particular quantum information, quantum optics, and quantum foundations, as well as topics in general relativity, quantum gravity, and quantum field theory. Our capacity is limited, but we hope to contribute to continuation of the scientific development of the scientists from Ukraine and to mitigate the interruption of their academic activity due to the war. 

IQOQI-Vienna team

Here is the link for the talk this week: 11.15am Chicago time (16.15UT) – note that the US put its clocks forward already.

https://uic.zoom.us/j/83542291376?pwd=ZmxXQWpmUzIwcEJKRGIyTmlVYjZ1Zz09

Please follow speaker link for further information, and physical locations in Chicago and Geneva. See you there!

We are pleased to announce the first of our Spring speakers. On Wednesday, 16 March 2022 (UIC 11:15),  Flaminia Giacomini (Perimeter) will speak on Quantum superposition of massive bodies and the nature of gravity in quantum theory and beyond.

Full details on our speaker page above. Please join us in person, or on zoom or YouTube.

We invite applications to the International Summer Institute in Philosophy of Physics on the PHILOSOPHY OF COSMOLOGY and the PHILOSOPHY OF QUANTUM GRAVITY, hosted by the University of Geneva-University of Illinois at Chicago Cosmology Beyond Spacetime project, in Morzine, France, 26 June – 1 July 2022.

More information under the conferences tab – deadline March 15th.

Hope to see you there!

We are excited to announce that we will have hybrid (in-person and online) talks in December, starting Wednesday, 1st December 2021 at UIC, with Feraz Azhar (Notre Dame) speaking at UIC on Effective field theories as a novel probe of fine-tuning of cosmic inflation.

Abstract: The leading account of several salient observable features of our universe today is provided by the theory of cosmic inflation. But an important and thus far intractable question is whether inflation is generic, or whether it is finely tuned—requiring very precisely specified initial conditions. In this talk I will present work that argues that a recent, model-independent characterization of inflation—-that treats inflation as an effective field theory (EFT)—-promises to address this question in a thoroughly modern and significantly more comprehensive way than in the existing literature. Along the way, I will highlight recent work that addresses the initial conditions problem within the context of a dynamical systems analysis of a specific EFT of inflation, and will describe a roadmap for how such work might be extended to realize the promise claimed above.

In terms of technical difficulty, this talk rates 4/5 Einsteins.

See the Speakers page for details of timing and location. Hope to see you there!