At the April APS meeting: curing cosmic singularities

[marcus]

One of the sessions at the April meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) will be on what replaces classic GR singularities (like bigbang or black hole) when you move to a quantized theory.

Abhay Ashtekar will discuss this from the Loop side.
Gary Horowitz will discuss the String side of it.

http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR08/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=82743

This will be session B7 on the morning of 12 April. Will any PFer be there?

Here's Ashtekar's abstract

By now there are several examples in loop quantum gravity in which effects of quantum geometry became important, dominate the Planck regime and resolve classical singularities. The resulting quantum space-times are typically significantly larger than the original classical space-times. In simple examples, the physics of these quantum extensions has shed considerable light on issues such as the quantum nature of the big-bang and information loss puzzle. I will present a few examples to illustrate this growing area.

The next day Jorge Pullin will speak on
Recent developments in loop quantum gravity.

We review recent developments in loop quantum gravity emphasizing its applications in mini and midi-superspace situations.

That will be session M7, on Sunday afternoon
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR08/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=83486

Ashtekar and Pullin are invited speakers, giving relatively long presentations of 35 minutes. There will probably be a bunch of contributed talks---shorter in duration---on these and related topics, but I have only scanned the list of invited talks.

 

[jimgraber]

Hi Marcus,
I am planning to attend this meeting.
I will try to report a brief summary of what Abhay and Gary say.
I will also try to ask them what’s inside of an astronomical sized black hole, if there’s no singularity.
In fact, I think I’ll make that a new thread on “Beyond the Standard Model”.
Jim Graber