Events

In this lecture, Chris Tully will discuss the earliest moments of the cosmos.

In this talk, Charles Kane will discuss the application of this idea to the quantum Hall effect, topological insulators, topological semimetals and topological superconductors.

In this lecture, Kevin Peter Hand will explain the science behind how we know these oceans exist and what we suspect about the conditions on these icy worlds.

In this lecture, James Wray will describe his team’s efforts to characterize not only the where and the when of water on Mars, but also “how long,” “how warm” and “what was the chemistry?” Incorporating the latest results from both orbital imaging and surface roving, he will describe how these questions — and their preliminary answers — have sharpened our focus in planning the next missions to the Red Planet. Those missions will directly seek the signs of life on ancient Mars and potentially ferry life from Earth to a second home on Mars. These two near-future goals are both synergistic and conflicting, as the talk will discuss.

In this lecture, Leonardo Rastelli will overview the bootstrap approach, the idea that theory space can be determined from the general principles of symmetry and quantum mechanics. This strategy provides a new unifying language for QFT and has allowed researchers to make predictions for physical observables even in strongly coupled theories. Rastelli will illustrate the general framework in a few examples, ranging from the concrete (boiling water) to the abstract (supersymmetric theories in various spacetime dimensions).

What’s the longest sequence of steps you can create while guaranteeing your safety? If you’re two steps from death, the answer is 11. For three steps, the answer is 1,161. But what about for other numbers? This conundrum, the Erdős discrepancy problem, was conjectured by mathematician Paul Erdős in around 1932 and had gone unsolved for more than seven decades. In this lecture, Terence Tao will discuss his general solution to the problem, published last year, and its connections to the Chowla and Elliot conjectures in number theory. The solution incorporates mathematical tools from probability, number theory and information theory.