Cliff Burgess, McMaster University
The gravity of tinkering with einstein
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work well in the Earth’s immediate neighbourhood, but arguements abound that it needs modification at very small and/or very large distances. This talk tries to put this discussion into the broader context of similar situations in other areas of physics, and summarizes some of the lesssons which our good understanding of gravity in the solar system has for proponents for its modification over very long and very short distances (and the reconciliation with quantum mechanics that is usually involved). The main message is mixed: Some features of gravity are easier to modify than others. Also, evidence from cosmology seems to prefer features (like light scalars and small vacuum energies) that are not generic to the long-wavelength limit of fundamental theories, and this is a crucial clue that would be silly to ignore. In this colloquium I hope to organize what these contradictory messages might be telling us.
Bio: Dr. Cliff Burgess received his B.Sc. in a co-op programme, with a joint honours in Physics and Applied Math from the University of Waterloo. He did his doctoral work in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Texas in Austin under the supervision of Steven Weinberg. He is presently a professor with McMaster University’s department of Physics and Astronomy and is an Associate Faculty Member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He was a Killam Fellow from 2005 – 2007 and elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. He received the Canadian Association of Physicists/Centre de Recherches Mathematiques (CAP-CRM) prize for theoretical physics in 2010, and a Buchalter Cosmology Prize in 2016 and again in 2017.
April 15, 2026 @ 1:00pm (CST) in 237 Commons Center
Host: Tom Kephart