Dallas/Ft. Worth Harper Lecture with Craig Hogan: Limits of Reality: Space and Time on the Largest and Smallest Scales
Event Details
Space—the familiar space we live in, right here and now—is the first concept of physics we all learn as little kids, yet it is entangled with some of the deepest mysteries confronting physics. Space is based on the idea of locality, but experiments show that in reality, nothing happens at a definite time or place, which suggests that space is not as real as it seems. On the other hand, Einstein's theory of space and time predicts very real behaviors of space and time, such as black holes and gravitational waves. Hogan's talk will examine these issues by surveying the experiments being done at Fermilab—including the Dark Energy Survey and the Fermilab Holometer—and what we hope to learn from them and from the new science of gravitational waves.
Craig Hogan is the director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Hogan's research has spanned a wide range of cosmology, including theoretical studies of the early universe and gravitational waves, as well as cosmological experiments. He was a member of one of the teams recognized by the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the acceleration of the universe. He is currently coleading an effort at Fermilab to attempt the first measurement of a quantum behavior of space-time.
2:00–2:45 p.m. Registration and reception
2:45–4:00 p.m. Presentation and discussion
$20/person general admission
$10/recent graduate (College alumni of the past ten years and graduate alumni of the past five years)
Two complimentary registrations for members of the Alumni Leadership, Chicago, Harper, and Phoenix Societies
Speaker Profiles
Craig Hogan (Speaker)
Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics; Director, Fermilab Ctr for Particle Astrophysics, The University of Chicago
http://astro.uchicago.edu/people/craig-hogan.shtml
Craig Hogan
Professor, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics; Director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
Craig Hogan's theoretical work has encompassed many areas of astrophysical cosmology: the origin of the elements, cosmic phase transitions and defects, magnetic fields, background radiation, cosmic reionization, gravitational lensing, cosmic structure and dark matter, global cosmological parameters, and gravitational waves. His research has been recognized by prizes including an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, and the Gruber Cosmology Prize, awarded to the High-z Supernova Search Team for the co-discovery of cosmic Dark Energy. Hogan's recent scientific papers can be found on the preprint ArXiv.
His current work is developing a theory of a proposed new phenomenon, which he calls "holographic noise", a fundamental, universal uncertainty in the fabric of spacetime, due to a fundamental bandwidth of reality at the Planck frequency, 1044 bits per second. With colleagues at Fermilab, the University of Chicago, and other institutions, he is developing an experiment, the Fermilab Holometer, to measure this effect.