Upcoming Colloquium July 19

We are pleased to announce the ICTP Colloquium taking place today: "The Dynamics of the Gravitational Constant G," given by Claudio Bunster, a professor at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos (CECs) in Valdivia, Chile. The Colloquium, on Wednesday, 19 July at 16:30, will take place in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP, and will be livestreamed.

Educated at Universidad de Chile and Princeton University, Bunster has taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin and Universidad de Chile and has been a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was awarded the Chilean National Science Prize in 1995 and was elected foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2005. Bunster has been the Director of the Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECs) since its foundation in 1984. Besides its work as Director and his research activity in theoretical physics, Bunster has been involved in public service. He served as Presidential Science Advisor in President Eduardo Frei’s administration (1994-2000). He was also a member of the Dialogue Board on Human Rights (Mesa de Diálogo sobre Derechos Humanos), established by the Government to address pending human rights problems, with the participation of civilians and the military.

Colloquium abstract: The issue of the enormously small value that the gravitational constant G takes when expressed in microscopical units is revisited. A simple mechanism is discussed, which could implement Dirac's idea of G actually decaying; from an initial value commensurable with microscopical units to its value in the present epoch of the universe. The mechanism is based on the possibility of having, within one universe, domains with different values of G, whose borders are crossed by particles and forces. The dynamics of the novel kind of domain wall that separates two such dominions is largely dictated by the second law of thermodynamics as applied to a black hole. It is argued that this is a satisfactory state of affairs, since the expression of the entropy of a black hole is the formula in physics where all the constants characterising its different realms appear together in a poignant manner.

More information: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8271/