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Vedika Khemani, Stanford University Quantum Matter Out of Equilibrium The study of condensed matter physics is a defining success of 20th century science. The first quantum revolution, which gave us our modern semiconductor-based information age, was fueled by our understanding of novel collective phases of systems of many interacting quantum… Read More

David Kaiser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Secret Clocks: The U.S. Military, Einstein’s Relativity, and the Global Positioning System. For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the new military technology… Read More

Szabolcs Marka, Columbia University Why we do what we do, with passion?  Synergies in Science from Cataclysmic Cosmic Explosions to a Better Earth. The discovery of gravitational waves and their synergistic fingerprint has opened tremendous opportunities for astrophysics. Extraordinary instrumental breakthroughs in gravitational-wave detectors on Earth and in Space, in… Read More

Alexander Maloney, McGill University Quantum Information Theory, Black Holes, and Space-time I will describe recent progress on the relationship between quantum information theory and quantum gravity. I will review the theoretical evidence that classical space-time geometry emerges from the entanglement of more fundamental quantum mechanical degrees of freedom, and that… Read More

Roger Blandford, KIPAC, Stanford Jets, Disks and Winds from Spinning Black Holes: Nature or Nurture? An alternative interpretation of discussion of slow accretion onto massive black holes in galactic nuclei is discussed. It is proposed that the disk is primarily powered by the black hole rotation, not the release of… Read More

John Jumper, Google DeepMind Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction and Its Applications Our work on deep learning for biology, specifically the AlphaFold system, has demonstrated that neural networks are capable of highly accurate modeling of both protein structure and protein-protein interactions. In particular, the system shows a remarkable ability to… Read More

Karen Kasza, Columbia University Stress management: cell packings and tissue flows in developing embryos During embryonic development, groups of cells reorganize into functional tissues with complex form and structure. Tissue reorganization can be rapid and dramatic, often occurring through striking embryo-scale flows that are mediated by the coordinated actions of… Read More

Stephen Taylor, Vanderbilt University The Dawn of Galaxy-Scale Gravitational Wave Astronomy For more than 15 years, NANOGrav and other pulsar-timing array collaborations have been carefully monitoring networks of pulsars across the Milky Way. The mission was to find a tell-tale signature amid the data from all those pulsars that would… Read More

Heinrich Paes, TU-Dortmund The One – How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics If quantum mechanics describes the universe, quantum entanglement merges the entire cosmos into an all-encompassing, indivisible, unified whole or “One”. It is the perspective of the observer, by means of decoherence, that lets her experience… Read More

Mark Trodden, University of Pennsylvania Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics; Co-Director, Center for Particle Cosmology Gravity in the Age of Precision Cosmology General Relativity (GR) has proven to be one of our best-tested and most successful physical theories. In this colloquium I will discuss the role… Read More

Frans Pretorius, Princeton University Professor of Physics; Director, Princeton Gravity Initiative Open Questions on the Dynamics of Black Holes Today we have a solid theoretical understanding of the dynamics of black holes, as predicted by general relativity, for the typical binary merger expected as an astrophysical gravitational wave source. However,… Read More

Charles Gale, McGill University Distinguished James McGill Professor, Department of Physics Light from the little bang: Photons from strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions At high energy densities, matter interacting via the nuclear strong interaction transforms into an exotic state: the quark-gluon plasma. This material was produced a few microseconds… Read More

Travis Humble, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director, Quantum Science Center Discovery and Innovation in Quantum Science and Technology The Quantum Science Center is a National Quantum Information Science Research Center headquartered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The purpose of the center is to discover and innovate in the field of… Read More

Andrew Strominger, Harvard University Gwill E. York Professor of Physics Black Holes: The Most Mysterious Objects in the Universe In the last decade black holes have come to center stage in both theoretical and observational science. Theoretically, they were shown a half-century ago by Stephen Hawking and others to obey… Read More

James Dent, Sam Houston State University Gravitational Waves and Physics Beyond the Standard ModeL The advent of gravitational wave astronomy has opened a fantastic new window on the study of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics and early universe cosmology. This talk will touch on several theoretical arenas… Read More

Edgar Shaghoulian, University of California, Santa Cruz Black holes, cosmology, and quantum entanglement Stephen Hawking’s black hole information paradox is a conflict between gravity and quantum mechanics, and it has been both a crisis and a guiding light for theoretical physicists for over 40 years. I will describe recent work… Read More

William H. Press, The University of Texas at Austin Science in the White House Increasingly, for many public issues, good science is essential to the creation of good policy. What are the mechanisms for informing and advising government policy-makers, from the President of the United States on down, about science–especially… Read More

Duncan Lorimer, West Virginia University Making Sense of the Census — The Cosmological Population of Fast Radio Bursts Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration pulses of unknown origin that were discovered by an undergraduate student at West Virginia University in 2007. They share a number of similarities with gamma-ray bursts which… Read More

Karen E. Kasza, Columbia University Stress management: cell packings and tissue flows in developing embryos During embryonic development, groups of cells reorganize into functional tissues with complex form and structure. Tissue reorganization can be rapid and dramatic, often occurring through striking embryo-scale flows that are mediated by the coordinated actions… Read More

Chris Monahan, William & Mary Pictures of a proton: quarks, gluons and hadrons from first principles Understanding in detail the properties of protons and neutrons, two of the basic building blocks of the visible Universe, has been a long-standing goal for nuclear physics. The strong nuclear force binds together quarks… Read More