Science & Cocktails: Andrew Strominger - Exploring the Edges of the Universe

The Science & Cocktails edition with Andrew Strominger on June 9th is cancelled due to the measures surrounding the coronvirus COVID-19. Ticket buyers will receive an e-mail with more information shortly. See here for more information about cancelled events in corona times.

Event in English, semi-seated.
19:30 doors open for cocktails
19:45 t.b.a. (live music)
20:30 Andrew Strominger (talk)

Science & Cocktails is a series of public talks by scientists with live music and smoky dry-ice chilled cocktails in your hand. Andrew Strominger, Professor of Theoretical physics at Harvard University, will describe some of our ongoing confusion, progress and excitement about our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, and the edges of both our knowledge and space itself. Dive into black holes, horizons and string theory with tasty cocktails and live music beforehand. 
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Exploring the Edges of the Universe: Black Holes, Horizons and Strings

What are the edges of universe? What are black holes? What kind of horizons exist in the universe? What does string theory have to do with any of that?

The scientific quest to understand the fundamental laws of nature has been ongoing for centuries. Andrew Strominger will describe some of our ongoing confusion, progress and excitement about the edges of both our knowledge and space itself.

The visible universe has edges, known as event horizons, which surround a black hole or a region of space speeding away faster than light. Event horizons are governed by a strikingly simple set of quantum laws which imply that black holes are at once the simplest and most complex objects in the physical universe. As discovered four decades ago by Bekenstein and Hawking, this dichotomy underlies a deep paradox, the resolution of which has become a focal point of modern physics. Unexpectedly, insight into this paradox has recently been gained from string theory.  

That nothing can travel faster than light, that quantum mechanics is a weird theory, space, time and gravity all come together in this exciting lecture that brings all we know of the fundamental laws of nature into perspective and hints towards new and yet undiscovered fundamental laws that underly the entire universe. 

Andrew Strominger
Andrew Strominger is professor Theoretical physics at Harvard University and director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. He has made significant contributions to quantum gravity, black holes and string theory. These include his work on Calabi–Yau compactification and topology change in string theory, and on the stringy origin of black hole entropy. He is a senior fellow at the Society of Fellows, and is the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics. He is one of the founding members of the black hole initiative and has received numerous prizes, including the Klein medal, the Dirac medal, and the Physics Frontiers Breakthrough Prize in 2014 and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2017.

This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support of NWA Route2. Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso and acknowledges the support of New Scientist.