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For thousands of years people have wondered, "Are we alone?" Out of the 500 planets so far known to orbit nearby stars, about 100 transit their host stars, that is, the planet goes in front of its star as seen from Earth. The transiting planets are "goldmines" for astronomers, because the planetary sizes, masses, and atmospheres can be routinely measured. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope is further revolutionizing transiting exoplanet studies with its unprecedented photometric precision. Dr. Seager will share her unique insights as a member of the Kepler Science Team including a discussion of recent Kepler announcements. She will also share information on the pioneering technology development that will fuel the search for life on other worlds.

Scattering amplitudes in gauge theories and gravity have extraordinary properties that are completely invisible in the textbook formulation of quantum field theory using Feynman diagrams. In the standard approach--going back to the birth of quantum field theory--space-time locality and quantum-mechanical unitarity are made manifest at the cost of introducing huge gauge redundancies in our description of physics. As a consequence, apart from the very simplest processes, Feynman diagram calculations are enormously complicated, while the final results turn out to be amazingly simple, exhibiting hidden infinite-dimensional symmetries. This strongly suggests the existence of a new formulation of quantum field theory where locality and unitarity are derived concepts, while other physical principles are made more manifest. Rapid advances have been made towards uncovering this new picture, especially for the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions. These developments have interwoven and exposed connections between a remarkable collection of ideas from string theory, twistor theory and integrable systems, as well as a number of new mathematical structures in algebraic geometry. In this talk I will review the current state of this subject and and describe a number of ongoing directions of research.

I will discuss a novel approach to time-dependent background fields of string theory, which allows the identification of configurations which satisfy the conformal invariance conditions to all orders in the Regge slope parameter alpha'. I will present a graviton, dilaton and tachyon configuration which is a resummation of all orders in the Regge slope and is shown to satisfy the conformal invariance conditions order by order, to all orders in alpha', up to field redefinitions which do not change the dependence of the fields on the target space-time coordinates, due to a property termed as "homogeneity" of the Weyl anomaly coefficients. It describes an inflationary universe in the sigma-model frame, while in the Einstein frame it corresponds either to a de Sitter or to a power-law universe, depending on the values of the dilaton and the tachyon amplitudes. Possible ways to connect these different solutions, which may correspond to different epochs of the universe, will also be discussed.

Gauge/gravity duality, a concept which emerged from string theory, holds promise for revealing the secrets of certain strongly interacting real world condensed matter systems. Historically, string theorists presented their subject as a promising framework for a quantum theory of gravity. More recently, the AdS/CFT correspondence and gauge/gravity dualities have emerged as powerful tools for using what we already know about gravity to investigate the properties of strongly interacting field theories. I will cherry pick and discuss a few recent developments where black holes are used to calculate the thermodynamic and transport properties of quantum critical systems, superconductors, and superfluids.

Symmetric monoidal categories provide a convenient and enlightening framework within which to compare and contrast physical theories on a common mathematical footing. In this talk we consider two theories: stabiliser qubit quantum mechanics and the toy bit theory proposed by Rob Spekkens. Expressed in the categorical framework the two theories look very similar mathematically, reflecting their common physical features. There are differences though: in particular a finite Abelian group emerges naturally in the categorical framework, and this group is different in each case ($Z_4$ for the stabiliser theory and $Z_2 \times Z_2$ for the toy bit theory). It turns out that this mathematical difference corresponds directly with a key physical difference between the theories: the stabiliser theory cannot be modelled by local hidden variables, while the toy bit theory can. This analysis can be extended to other Abelian groups yielding a group-theoretic criterion for determining the possibility of local hidden variable interpretations for other physical theories.

In the picture of eternal inflation, our observable universe resides inside a single bubble nucleated from an inflating false vacuum. Some of the theories giving rise to eternal inflation predict that we have causal access to collisions with other bubble universes, providing an opportunity to confront these theories with observation. In this talk, I will outline progress on the theoretical description of eternal inflation and bubble collisions, and present results from the first search for the effects of bubble collisions in the WMAP 7-year data.

N=8 supergravity in 4 dimensions exhibits a surprisingly favorable UV behavior -- it is known from explicit computations that the 4-point amplitudes in N=8 supergravity are finite up to 4-loop order. I explain how a "matrix-element approach" can be used to study candidate counterterms for UV divergences in this theory. This approach both demystifies the finiteness found in previous computations, and predicts finiteness of arbitrary n-point amplitudes in N=8 supergravity below the 7-loop order. It also points to the 7-loop 4-point amplitude as the first amplitude whose finiteness is not guaranteed by any known symmetry of the theory.