ABSTRACT

Discovered immediately after the birth of Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915, it took a half-century for most physicists to fathom the concept of a black hole. The quest to comprehend its thermodynamic and quantum nature has occupied the last half-century and is still ongoing. I will discuss the key stages of discovery in this long journey, the insights it has yielded, and some of the current ideas and outlook. The stakes are high, with implications for our understanding of the vacuum and perhaps even the origin of spacetime geometry.

About the Speaker:

Ted Jacobson earned a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Texas, Austin (in 1983). After postdocs at UCSB and Brandeis, he moved to the University of Maryland where he currently works on gravitational theory. He is a Fellow of the APS and AAAS, and a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.