General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology

Time is one of the most basic features of nature which has been extensively discussed in philosophy and physics. In contrast, time is rather neglected in neuroscience; here time is only conceived in terms of our perception and cognition of time. That leaves open the relevance of time itself, that is, how the brain constitutes its own temporal dynamics and how that is relevant for, for instance, consciousness and other mental features like self. My talk will discuss recent findings showing various features of the brain's temporal dynamics and how these are relevant in constituting mental features like consciousness and self as well as their changes in psychiatric disorders. 

We review recent efforts to turn the cosmological constant into a dynamical variable without an ungainly proliferation of free parameters. In a cosmological setting where parity invariance is imposed (along with homogeneity and isotropy) this leads to phenomenological disaster. However, in this theory it is possible to construct parity violating Friedman models due to torsion, a re-enactment of "Cartan's spiral staircase". We examine the Hamiltonian structure of the 2 branches (parity compliant and parity violating) and conclude that they must correspond to different theories, with different numbers of degrees of freedom. Parity violation may save these models phenomenologically, giving observational relevance to the Pontryagin invariant (and possibly the Immirzi parameter) in cosmology.

The event horizon and the Cauchy horizon of an extremal black hole admit conserved charges associated with scalar perturbations. We will see that these charges are externally measurable from null infinity. This suggests that these charges have the potential to serve as an observational signature for extremal black holes. The proof of this result is based on obtaining precise late-time asymptotics for the radiation field of outgoing perturbations.