Visite exceptionnelle de Gerard ‘t Hooft les 5/6 octobre à Marseille/Luminy

A l’occasion de sa visite sur le campus de Marseille/Luminy dans le contexte du Labex OCEVU, Gerard ‘t Hooft donnera deux interventions (voir titre et résumé ci-dessous) :

- La première sera à destination d’un large public le jeudi 5 octobre 2017 de 16h à 17h30 ;

- la seconde sera à destination d’un public restreint de scientifiques le vendredi 6 octobre de 10h30 à 12h30.

*/ Conférence grand public - Jeudi 5 octobre 2017 de 16h à 17h30

AMPHITHÉÂTRE 6 - BATIMENT A - FACULTÉ DES SCIENCES – Campus de Luminy

ATTENTION : conférence en langue anglaise

The role of black holes in our understanding of the physical world

Abstract: When heavy stars collapse under their own weight, or collide against other heavy objects, black holes may form. These events are extremely violent, severely shaking the fabric of space and time, causing gravitational ripples that have recently been detected after having crossed over billions of light years. This way, astronomical black holes can serve as beacons reporting about conditions in the universe very far from us. 
Black holes can be seen as blobs of pure gravity, and although their behaviour is often difficult to calculate, the laws obeyed by them are well-known and understood.
We can also imagine that, at least in principle, black holes could be many orders of magnitude smaller.  Then,  we enter a domain of science that is not at all well explored let alone understood. It is believed that small black holes will actually emit particles, but how will these emitted particles relate to the particles that were absorbed by the black hole? Should the tiniest black holes behave as subatomic particles themselves?
If you send a message to a black hole, how will it report back? Such questions are now haunting physicists, and in trying to find answers, we learn new things about space, time, and matter, such as the allowed embedding of time-like Moebius strips, which will be explained.

*/ Séminaire au CPT – Vendredi 6 octobre 2017 de 10h30 à 12h30
 

Amphithéâtre 6 - FACULTÉ DES SCIENCES – Campus de Luminy
 

Black holes, quantum mechanics, and the topology of space and time

Abstract: Standard laws of physics seem to lead to contradictions when applied to the quantum states a black hole can be in. This implies that black holes must be important clues to help us improving the formulation of these laws. On the one hand, space and time seem to become discrete, on the other they become topologically non-trivial. To gain control over the way black holes process information, it is advised to use spherical harmonics, in terms of which the problems reduce to simple partial differential equations that we can solve, just as in the hydrogen atom.

Le Professeur Gerard 't Hooft a fait ses études de physique théorique à l'Université d'Utrecht au Pays Bas.
Son travail de thèse du début des années 1970 a permis d'élucider la structure quantique du Modèle Standard des particules élémentaires qui continue d'être vérifiée par de nombreuses expériences aujourd'hui et en 1999 le Prix Nobel de Physique lui a été attribué.
Depuis le début des années 1980, il s'intéresse au problème du comportement quantique des trous noirs.