Talks

I revisit an example of stronger-than-quantum correlations that was discovered by Ernst Specker in 1960. The example was introduced as a parable wherein an over-protective seer sets a simple prediction task to his daughter's suitors. The challenge cannot be met because the seer asks the suitors for a noncontextual assignment of values but measures a system for which the statistics are inconsistent with such an assignment. I will show how by generalizing these sorts of correlations, one is led naturally to some well-known proofs of nonlocality and contextuality, and to some new ones. Specker's parable involves a kind of complementarity that does not arise in quantum theory - three measurements that can be implemented jointly pairwise but not triplewise -- and therefore prompts the question of what sorts of foundational principles might rule out this kind of complementarity. This is joint work with Howard Wiseman and Yeong-Cherng Liang.

The entropy outside of an event horizon can never decrease if one includes a term proportional to the horizon area. For a long time, this astonishing result had only been shown for quantum fields that are in an approximately steady state. I will describe a new proof of the generalized second law for arbitrary slices of semiclassical, rapidly-changing horizons. I will start with the simplest case, Rindler horizons, and then describe how the proof can be adapted to other cases (black holes, de Sitter, etc.) by restricting the field algebra to the horizon. The generalized second law holds because the horizon is invariant under a larger symmetry group than the rest of the spacetime.

A remarkable result from heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is that shortly after a collision, the medium produced behaves as a nearly ideal liquid. The system is very dynamic and evolves from a state of two colliding nuclei to a liquid in a time roughly equivalent to the time it takes light to cross a proton. Understanding the mechanisms behind the rapid approach to a liquid state is a challenging task. In recent years holography has emerged as a powerful tool to study non-equilibrium phenomena, mapping the (challenging) dynamics of quantum systems onto the dynamics of classical gravitational systems. The creation of a liquid in a quantum theory maps onto the classical process of gravitational collapse and black hole formation. I will describe how one can use holography to study processes which mimic the dynamics of heavy ion collisions.

Isaac Newton is known today as one of the most profound scientists to have ever lived. Newton's discoveries in physics, optics, and mathematics overturned a variety of fundamental beliefs about nature and reshaped science in ways that are still powerfully with us. But this is only part of Newton's fascinating story. Research over the last generation has revealed that the famous scientist spent over thirty years composing, transcribing, and expounding alchemical texts, resulting in a mass of papers totaling about a million manuscript words. In fact, Newton seems to have considered himself one of an elite alchemical brotherhood, even going so far as to coin private anagrams of his name in the secretive custom of the sons of art. Despite our growing knowledge of Newton's deep involvement in alchemy, one basic question remains to be answered Why did the founder of Newtonian physics believe in alchemy, a discipline long viewed as discredited in the modern scientific world? William R. Newman's lecture will attempt to arrive at an answer to that question by providing the evidence that led seventeenth-century thinkers to an acceptance of alchemical transmutation.