The Bethe Lecture Series - Spring 2007

The Bethe Lecture series honors Hans A. Bethe, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Cornell, whose research extended across fields as diverse as the quantum theory of solids and the nuclear processes of the sun, receiving the Nobel Prize for the later work in 1967. The Bethe Lectures have been given annually since 1977.

“…the spirit of physics, the idea of discovery … the beauty of how it fits together, and the beauty that the laws of physics are immutable.”

Hans A. Bethe

Joseph Polchinski
Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics
University of California, Santa Barbara

Polchinski received his BA degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1975 and his PhD from Berkeley in 1980. After two-year stints as a research associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) and at Harvard, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.  He moved to UC Santa Barbara in 1992, where he is a Professor of Physics and a Permanent Member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Polchinski’s contributions to theoretical physics include a modern formulation of renormalization theory, following ideas of Ken Wilson, and some of the original work on the string landscape.  He is best known for his discovery of D-branes, extended structures that appear to be central to the mathematics and physics of string theory.  He is also the author of a widely used two-volume text on string theory.

Polchinski held an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship from 1985 to 1989, and he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.  He has recently been awarded the 2007 Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics.

The Lectures

Gauge/Gravity Duality: From Black Holes to the Bethe Ansatz
Physics Colloquium. Monday, March 12, 4:00 p.m. Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall.

Cosmic String Loops and Gravitational Wave Signatures
Physics Special Bethe Lecture, Wednesday, March 14, 1:30 p.m. 311 Newman Lab.

Superstrings, Cosmic Strings, and the Landscape
Public Lecture. Wednesday, March 14, 7:30 p.m. Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall.

The Abstracts

Physics Colloquium. Monday, March 12, 4:00 p.m.
Gauge/Gravity Duality: From Black Holes to the Bethe Ansatz

The duality between gauge theories and gravity, discovered by Maldacena, is a deep and unexpected connection between seemingly different physical theories.  On the one hand, it gives new tools for solving strongly coupled gauge theories, some of which have been useful in understanding the heavy ion experiments at RHIC.  On the other hand, it provides new insight into the nature of quantum gravity and string theory.  I review these ideas and discuss future directions. 

Cosmic String Loops and Gravitational Wave Signatures
Physics Special Bethe Lecture, Wednesday, March 14, 1:30 p.m. 311 Newman Lab.

Cosmic string loops emit a large amount of gravitational radiation, and this is one of the most promising avenues for discovery of cosmic strings.  However, even for the simplest cosmic string networks, the difficulty of simulating the dynamics has led to an uncertainty of tens of orders of magnitude in the size at which these loops form; hence the gravitational wave signature is very uncertain.  I describe a recent analytic model which, in combination with recent simulations, may solve this problem.

Public Lecture. Wednesday, March 14, 7:30 p.m
Superstrings, Cosmic Strings, and the Landscape

The search for a unified theory of physics, one that combines quantum  mechanics and general relativity, faces many challenges.  One was discovered by Max Planck more than 100 years ago: the unification appears to take place at distances so small that they are  inaccessible to direct experiment.  Another, argued by many cosmologists, is that our laws of physics appear to be determined ultimately by biology and not mathematics!  I discuss how string theory may meet these challenges, and the search for a possible smoking gun for string theory in the sky.

 

All Lectures will be held in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall