# Talks (titles and abstracts)

Barry Barish: tba

Lydia Bieri: tba

Claudio Bunster: tba

Gui-Qiang Chen: tba

Mihalis Dafermos: tba

Thibault Damour: tba

Ruth Durrer: General Relativity and Cosmology

Cosmology cannot really be formulated without General Relativity (GR). Only within the GR framework can we consider a consistent gravitating spacetime. After a historical perspective I will concentrate on a few ’pearls’ of present cosmological research like the cosmic microwave background (CMB), weak lensing and weak lensing of the CMB. I shall explain how planned high precision CMB polarisation experiments will be able to measure effects of frame dragging on cosmological scales.

Domenico Giulini: tba

Gerhard Huisken: tba

Carlos Kenig: tba

Sergiu Klainerman: tba

Joachim Krieger: tba

Enno Lenzmann: tba

Andrew Majda: tba

Wilhelm Schlag: tba

Richard Schoen: tba

Jalal Shatah: tba

David Spergel: tba

"To what extent can general relativity account for atomic structure of matter and for quantum effects?" This was a question asked by Einstein and Rosen in their famous paper of 1935 entitled "The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity" (nowadays widely referred to as "the ER paper"). More recently, prominent physicists such as Freeman Dyson have cast doubt on the possibility, or even the wisdom of, combining general relativity with quantum mechanics. In this talk I will describe how our knowledge of general relativity can in fact help us gain new insight into the microscopic world of elementary particles and their quantum laws of motion. I will revisit Herman Weyl's so-called "singularity theory" of matter, and explain that the main obstacle on the path to a possible symbiosis of GR and QM is a well-known classical problem, namely the infinities inherent in Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics of point charges. I will discuss a possible remedy to this problem, and report on the recent progress my colleague Michael Kiessling and I have made in this research project, which also involves some of our students and research associates.

Robert M. Wald: You Can't Over-Charge or Over-Spin a Black Hole

The Kerr-Newman solutions are the only stationary black hole solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell equations in 4-dimensions. However, these solutions describe black holes only when the inequality $$M^2 \geq (J/M)^2 + Q^2$$ is satisfied, where $$M$$, $$J$$, and $$Q$$ are the mass, angular momentum, and charge of the black hole. Therefore, if an extremal or nearly extremal black hole can be made to absorb matter with sufficiently large angular momentum or charge as compared with its energy, one would obtain an apparent contradiction with cosmic censorship. Hubeny and others have made proposals as to how this might be done, but a proper analysis of this proposal requires a calculation of all second order effects on energy, including, in particular, effects arising from self-force. We show in this work that when all of the second order effects are taken into account, no over-charging or over-spinning of a black hole can occur, provided only that the non-electromagnetic matter satisfies the null energy condition.

Gilbert Weinstein: tba

Sijue Wu: tba

Zhouping Xin,: tba

Shing-Tung Yau: tba

Page URL: https://www.math.ethz.ch/fim/conferences/christodoulou/talks.html
Fri May 26 19:00:21 CEST 2017
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