Talks

How should we think about quantum computing? The usual answer to this question is based on ideas inspired by computer science, such as qubits, quantum gates, and quantum circuits. In this talk I will explain an alternate geometric approach to quantum computation. In the geometric approach, an optimal quantum computation corresponds to "free falling" along the minimal geodesics of a certain Riemannian manifold. This reformulation opens up the possibility of using tools from geometry to understand the strengths and weaknesses of quantum computation, and perhaps to understand what makes certain physical operations difficult (or easy) to synthesize.

The anatomy of a black hole.
Learning Outcomes:
• What are the mass requirements for a star to become a black hole?
• The anatomy of a Schwarzschild black hole, including the singularity and the event horizon.
• What a traveller would experience if he orbited a black hole, or had the bad luck to fall through the event horizon.

The physical attributes of a black hole and what types of physical evidence astronomers use the locate them.
Learning Outcomes:
• What are the physical requirements for a star to become a black hole, and what properties of that star remain after the black hole is formed?
• The types of black holes, including: the Schwarzschild black hole, the Reissner-Nordström black hole, the Kerr black hole, and the Kerr-Newman black hole.
• What a traveller would experience if he orbited one of these more general black holes, or fell through to the singularity.

An introduction to a few of the major scientists who applied Einstein's ideas to better understand the life cycle of various stars.
Learning Outcomes:
• How Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar resolved the paradox of the white dwarf star, and how Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky described the dynamics of neutron stars.
• Yakov Zel'dovich develops the nuclear chain reaction that is the engine that keeps stars burning.
• The roles Robert J. Oppenheimer , John Wheeler, and Roger Penrose played in moving the concept of a black hole from a object of pure theory to a physical object in the universe.

The mathematical predictions made by scientists tell a story of the life and death of stars.
Learning Outcomes:
• How the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram describes the life cycle of stars.
• Depending on its mass, how a star ends its life as a white dwarf star, a neutron star, or a black hole, and where super novas fit in.
• How the mathematical predictions of white dwarf stars, super novas, and neutron stars are slowly verified by the advancement of the astronomical equipment used by astronomers.

Spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve.
Learning Outcomes:
• Why gravity can be seen as a curvature of spacetime.
• That Einstein’s field equations describe how matter curves spacetime.
• How Sir Arthur Eddington verified Einstein’s theory of general relativity by measuring the change in position of stars during a solar eclipse.

We shift our ideas from Newton’s law of gravity to a new set of equations that describe how gravity is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime.
Learning Outcomes:
• John Michell and his hypothetical object called a dark star.
• How to determine the mass of a planet required for the escape velocity of an object to be the speed of light.
• Einstein’s Equivalence Principle.