100 YEARS of SPACETIME & GRAVITY:
 
   an EVENING with BILL & BOB

Bill Unruh
University of British Columbia

Bob Wald
Kavli Institute and Enrico Fermi Institute
Univerisity of Chicago

22nd October, 7.30-9.30 pm, Buchanan Building Block A
1866 Main Mall, University of British Columbia

Bill Unruh (UBC,Vancouver)

Bill Unruh is one of the main architects of the field of quantum gravity, along with people like R. P. Feynman, G. 't Hooft, and S. W. Hawking. His best-known contributions to this field are (i) the idea of Unruh radiation and the Unruh effect, and (ii) the idea that one can make 'analogue models' of quantum gravitational effects using systems on earth, including moving fluid surfaces and patterns of light made by lasers. This has recently allowed researchers at UBC to look at the details of Hawking and Unruh radiation around black holes, using tanks of water in the engineering faculty. To demonstrate the curvature of space in the universe, Bill uses his famous beachball (see photo)

Bob Wald (University of Chicago)

Bob Wald has been one of the principal figures in the modern development of the theory of black holes, particularly where it comes to their quantum properties (first discovered by Hawking). He is also made crucial contributions to the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime, where his work has overlapped with that of Bill Unruh. Bob's ideas have been applied, by himself and many others, to understand how strong gravitational effects affect all sorts of important processes in astrophysics and cosmology, where things like "Wald entropy" and "Wald energy" play an important role.

Bill and Bob have also collaborated in the past, in particular in pushing the idea, due originally to Hawking, that information disappears down a black hole (even after Hawking publicly withdrew this idea). If correct, this means that quantum mechanics must fail in strong gravitational fields (see our resource pages).