Do You Fall at the Same Rate as Your Mirror Image?
51Google Tech Talk
April 22, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Stephon Alexander
ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, based on work pioneered by the speaker, cosmologists have had reason to suspect that Einstein's gravity has a preferred handedness (chirality). In this talk, after giving an overview of the structure of general relativity, I will explore the cosmological, gravitational wave detection and particle physics consequences of the Chiral Nature of General Relativity. I conclude with an astonishing new direction of unifiying gravity with the weak nuclear interaction, that differs from string theory. At stake potentially is the long elusive goal of physicists to develop a Grand Unified Theory - a coherent model of particle physics, gravitation and cosmology!
Speaker Info
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist specializing in the interface between cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity (String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity). He is currently the Ernest Everett Just 1907 Professor of Natural Sciences. He received his BSc (1993) from Haverford College and PhD (2000) from Brown University. He held postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College, London and The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He previously held faculty positions at Penn State and Haverford College.
Research Interests
Theoretical Cosmology: Cosmological Constant Problem, Baryogenesis, Cosmic Inflation, Structure Formation, Singularity Resolution, Quantum Fields in Curved Spaces, String Cosmology. Quantum Gravity: String Theory, Modified Theories of Gravity, Loop Quantum Gravity/Spin Foams. Music: Instrument Acoustic Modelling, Geometry and Math of Music. Recent publications: http://inspirehep.net/search?p=author%3AS.Alexander.2+