Colloquium

In his classic essay, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries  but also the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute’s current director, explains how Flexner’s defense of the value of “the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge” may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change.

The observations of gravitational waves from the mergers of compact binary sources opens a new way to learn about the universe as well as to test General Relativity in the limit of strong gravitational interactions – the dynamics of massive bodies traveling at relativistic speeds in a highly curved space-time. The lecture will describe some of the difficult history of gravitational waves proposed about 100 years ago.  The concepts used in the instruments and the methods for data analysis that enable the measurement of gravitational wave strains of 10-21 and smaller will be presented. The results derived from the measured waveforms, their relation to the Einstein field equations and the astrophysical implications are discussed. The talk will end with a vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy.

Our sense of smell is extraordinarily good at molecular recognition: we can identify tens of thousands of odorants unerringly over a wide concentration range. The mechanism by which this happens is still hotly debated. One view is that molecular shape governs smell, but this notion has turned out to have very little predictive power. Some years ago I revived a discredited theory that posits instead that the nose is a vibrational spectroscope, and proposed a possible underlying mechanism, inelastic electron tunneling. In my talk I will review the history and salient facts of this problem and describe some recent experiments, both on fruit flies and on humans, that go some way towards answering the question. 

In general relativity causal relations between any pair of events is uniquely determined by locally predefined variables - the distribution of matter-energy degrees of freedom in the events' past light-cone. Under the assumption of locally predefined causal order, agents performing freely chosen local operations on an initially local quantum state cannot violate Bell inequalities. However, superposition of massive objects can effectively lead to "entanglement" in the temporal order between groups of local operations, enabling the violation of the inequalities. This shows that temporal orders between events can be "indefinite" in non-classical space-times.

The much-anticipated joint detection of gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation was achieved for the first time on August 17, 2017, for the binary neutron star merger GW170817.  This event was detected by Advanced LIGO/Virgo, gamma-ray satellites, and dozens of telescopes on the ground and in space spanning from radio to X-rays.  In this talk I will describe the exciting discovery of the optical counterpart, which in turn led to several detailed studies across the electromagnetic spectrum.  The results of the observations carried out by our team include the first detailed study of a "kilonova", an optical/infrared counterpart powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the merger, as well as the detection of an off-axis jet powering radio and X-ray emission.  These results provide the first direct evidence that neutron star mergers are the dominant site for the r-process and are the progenitors of short GRBs.  I will also describe how studies of the host galaxy shed light on the merger timescale, and describe initial constraints on the Hubble Constant from the combined GW and EM detection.        

The Cosmic Web is the fundamental spatial organization of matter in the Universe on scales of a few up to a hundred Megaparsec, scales at which the Universe still resides in a state of moderate dynamical evolution. Galaxies, intergalactic gas and dark matter exist in a wispy weblike spatial arrangement consisting of dense compact clusters, elongated filaments, and sheetlike walls, amidst large near-empty void regions. The weblike pattern is marked by prominent anisotropic features, a distinct multiscale character, a complex spatial connectivity of its various morphological components and a clear asymmetry between voids and overdense regions.

This seminar will describe recent work on the structure and dynamics of the Cosmic Web. For the analysis of its complex and multiscale structural pattern, we invoke concepts from computational topology and computational geometry. We apply the explicit multi-scale -- parameter-free and scale-free -- Nexus/MMF Multiscale Morphology formalism to dissect the cosmic mass distribution into clusters, filaments, walls and voids. This results in a systematic study ofthe evolving size and volume distribution of these structural components. Subsequently, we assess the mass and halo distribution in the filaments and walls, and follow their evolution.

To study the dynamical evolution of the cosmic web, we describe our adhesion model of cosmic structure formation based on Voronoi and Delaunay tessellations. Subsequently, we will shortly describe how a full phase-space analysis allows us to understand the growth of structural complexity in terms of the emergence and spatial connectivity of singularities and caustics. Finally, we will discuss the migration flows of matter and galaxies along the cosmic web and prospects of using voids to constrain dark energy and dark matter.

With the groundbreaking gravitational wave detections from LIGO/VIRGO, we have entered the era where we can actually observe the action of strongly curved spacetime originally predicted by Einstein.  Going hand in hand with this, there has been a renaissance in the theoretical and computational tools we use to understand and interpret the dynamics of gravity and matter in this regime.  I will describe some of the rich behavior exhibited by sources of gravitational waves such as the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. I will also discuss some of the open questions, and what these events could teach us, not only about the extremes of gravity, but about the behavior of matter at nuclear densities, the solution of astrophysical mysteries, and even the existence of new particles.

I will give an overview of the causal set approach to quantum gravity, and what makes this "fork in the road" distinct from other approaches.  Motivated by deep theorems in Lorentzian geometry, causal set theory (CST) posits that the underlying fabric of spacetime is  atomistic and encoded in a locally finite partially ordered set. In  the continuum  approximation,  the partial order corresponds to the causal structure, and the cardinality to the conformal factor.  Together, these give the approximate continuum geometry.  Lorentz invariance emerges as a consequence, but brings with it a certain  "non-locality”, which distinguishes CST  from other approaches in an essential way. It also makes the  reconstruction of spacetime geometry from the causal set particularly challenging.  I will describe some of the progress we have made in this geometric reconstruction program. I will then describe a particular formulation of CST dynamics inspired by the continuum path integral and discuss what we have learnt so far and where it is taking us. 

There is a long tradition of formulating Quantum Theory in an operational manner.  In one version of this a circuit is formed by wiring together operations. Each operation has knob settings and outcomes (lights flashing, detectors clicking, ..).  The question raised and answered in this colloquium is whether we can do the same for General Relativity.  There are hurdles that have to be overcome to do this - in particular, we need to define a diffeomorphism invariant notion of operations, identify what the knob settings and outcomes are, and what the wiring corresponds to.   In this colloquium I will provide an outline of how to formulate General Relativity like this providing a possibilistic calculus (we can calculate whether operationally described situations are possible or not).  This provides the beginnings of an operational approach to the problem of Quantum Gravity.  This talk is based on arxiv:1608.06940.  

The observed deviations from the laws of gravity of Newton and Einstein in galaxies and clusters can logically speaking be either due to the presence of unseen dark matter particles or due to a change in the way gravity works in these situations. Until recently there was little reason to doubt that general relativity correctly describes gravity in all circumstances. In the past few years insights from black hole physics and string theory have lead to a new theoretical framework in which the gravitational laws are derived from the quantum entanglement of the microscopic information that is underlying space-time. An essential ingredient in the derivation is of the Einstein equations is that the vacuum entanglement obeys an area law, a condition that is known to hold in Anti-de Sitter space due to the work of Ryu and Takayanagi. We will argue that in de Sitter space due to the positive dark energy, that the microscopic entanglement entropy also contains also a volume law contribution in addition to the area law. This volume law contribution is related to the thermal properties of de Sitter space and leads to a total entropy that precisely matches the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for the cosmological horizon. We study the effect of this extra contribution on the emergent laws of gravity, and argue that it leads to a modification compared to Einstein gravity. We provide evidence for the fact that this modification explains the observed phenomena in galaxies and clusters currently attributed to dark matter.

 I will present several studies showing a surprising pattern. Not only can preschoolers learn abstract higher-order principles from data, but younger learners are actually better at inferring unusual or unlikely principles than older learners and adults. This pattern also holds for children in Peru and in Headstart programs in Oakland, California. I relate this pattern to computational ideas about search and sampling, to evolutionary ideas about human life history, and to neuroscience findings about the negative effects of frontal control on wide exploration. My hypothesis is that our distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search, exploration and creativity, before the demands of goal-directed action set in.