PI Public Lecture Series:
Presented by
Title: String Theory LEGOs for Black Holes
Abstract: Four
decades ago, Stephen Hawking posed a paradox about black holes and quantum
theory that still challenges the imaginations of theoretical physicists today.
One of the most promising approaches to resolving the "information
paradox" (the notion that nothing, not even information itself, survives beyond
a black hole's point-of-no-return event horizon) is string theory, a part of
modern physics that has wiggled its way into the popular consciousness.
On
May 6, Dr. Amanda Peet, a physicist at the University of Toronto, will describe
how the string toolbox allows study of the extreme physics of black holes in
new and fruitful ways. Dr. Peet will unpack that toolbox to reveal the
versatility of strings and (mem)branes, and will explore the intriguing notion
that the world may be a hologram.
Biography: Amanda Peet is an Associate Professor of Physics at the
University of Toronto. They grew up in the South Pacific island nation of
Aotearoa/New Zealand, and earned a B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of
Canterbury in NZ and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in the USA. Their awards
include a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Research Fellowship. They were one of the string theorists interviewed in the
three-part NOVA PBS TV documentary "Elegant Universe". Web site: http://ap.io/home/.