Splash Biography

I am someone who is curious about the ‘big questions’ people are trying to answer in physics. I want to give you a quick tour of the things that make contemporary physics interesting to me, the questions people are asking in the field, and the reasons about why they are asking those questions. What is a quantum field (and how can we explain it from a simple pendulum)? What does the quantum fields have to do with a magnifying glass, and ice water transition? Why doesn’t gravity fit into the quantum picture? What other big questions are people concerned with? Like what is the infamous Blackhole information paradox (and why it’s a good laboratory for quantum gravity) and how the hell can space and time be ‘emergent’ (if you have heard of AdS/CFT, this is related!)

We will be discussing how black holes affect the spacetime around them, starting from Einstein's equations. We will discuss metrics, geodesics, Minkowski diagrams, Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes, Penrose diagrams, and some interesting consequences (gravitational redshifting, time dilation, frame dragging). No knowledge of relativity is required.

What is an alternative to Newtonian mechanics, which seem to be the only formalism in classical mechanics we learn in school? This course will introduce you to the wonderful world of variational mechanics (which I find to be much more elegant than Newtonian physics), covering Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, Noether's theorem, and how to derive principles of Newtonian mechanics. If we have time I will go through some problems and applications.

How does moving at a constant speed change how you view the world? We will be covering time dilation, length contraction, and loss of simultaneity, and derive the Lorentz transformations and present it with 4-vectors. We will compare these with the Galilean transformation and see how it reduces to classical mechanics if you suppose an infinite speed of light. Time permitting, we will work through some common problems and its roots in electromagnetism.