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Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime Prerequisites, Timetable, Outline, Literature, and more ... Summary and Overview The main aim of this course is to explain what are (some of) the obstacles that one faces when trying to generalise the standard formalism and procedures of Minkowski space Poincare-covariant QFT to curved spacetimes, and to illustrate the new phenomena that one encounters by some typical and important examples: particle creation by time-dependent gravitational fields, the Unruh effect, and (some elementary aspects of) Hawking black hole radiation and black hole thermodynamics. Many of the key-issues can already be understood in a purely quantum-mechanical context by studying the Heisenberg picture quantisation of a time-dependent harmonic oscillator, so I will spend some time to discuss the issue of quantisation ambiguities, Bogoliubov transformations, mode creation etc., in this setting. When moving on to field theory, we will consider the simplest...

Using a machine-learning algorithm, MIT researchers have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in two different mouse models. The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs. “We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “Our approach revealed this amazing molecule which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has...

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. ’ A teacher has the power to transform souls and touch someone’s life in a positive way. It is one of the noblest of professions that deal with life-changing and destiny-altering powers. The teacher has the present as raw material on which she will finally carve and design the future … the children. It’s an ever evolving yet challenging and lifelong learning environment of which we are an integral part. Teaching is a chance to touch someone’s life in a positive way. Teachers are the pillars of society for they educate and mould the future citizens of a country. Teaching, like any other activity, emerges from ones inwardness. Motivating and exciting students is the key. Passion for teaching is innate. At the core of caring relationships are positive and high expectations that not only structure and guide behaviours, but also challenge students to perform what they believ...

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. —Robert Frost, 1916 In his poem “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost famously wrote about choices. For graduate students in physics, the most familiar road is the academic path, but many other career paths are available to PhD physicists—far more than Frost’s two roads. According to NSF’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients, almost half of the 130 000 PhD physical scientists living and working in the US in 2017 were employed in the private sector, about 40% were employed in academia, and 9% worked in government settings In this article we examine the different career paths of PhD physicists working in private industry, academia, and government, and we describe what physicists in different sectors find rewarding about their chosen careers. In the first-ever 10-year follow-up survey of physics PhD recipients, the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics (AIP), whic...

The mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson was famed for his visionary ideas that stretched far beyond pure science. Hamish Johnston looks at the life of a scientist who was never afraid to speak his mind The British-born mathematical physicist and public intellectual Freeman Dyson, who died on 28 February 2020 at the age of 96, was one of the most celebrated figures in 20th-century physics. He had spent most of his professional life at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was a professor emeritus and remained active until his final few days. Dyson died at a hospital near Princeton, due to complications from a fall, according to his son, the science historian George Dyson. Dyson began his career in the 1940s, making important contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED) . Early on, however, he broadened his interests to include nuclear reactors, space travel, climate and biology – both on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos. Dyson a...

A couple of weeks back I posted an answer to a question from a Twitter follower’s child, who asked “How Strong Is Space?” That was fun, so here’s another kid-question answered, this one from my own eight-year-old who goes by “The Pip” for Internet purposes. The other night, he asked “Why can’t atoms touch each other?” I’m not sure the exact reason why he asked this, but the phrasing suggests it’s related to the observation that there’s almost always some microscopic empty space between things that appear to be touching on a macroscopic scale. Possibly it’s even connected to the “Atoms are mostly empty space” idea that Ethan talked about recently. The short and simple version of the answer is that it’s not really correct to think of atoms as solid objects like little balls that can be forced into physical contact with one another. Most of the “size” of an atom is just the electron cloud that surrounds the nucleus, and that’s not a solid thing— it will shift around in response to electri...

As someone who derives significant income from writing for money, I end up spending a fair bit of time reading writing advice. Not because I'm in need of tips, myself-- after many years of this, I've got a routine that mostly works for me. Rather, I'm looking for good advice to pass on to other people, because I get asked for advice on a regular basis, and I don't really have much of my own to offer. That's how I came to read this advice post from Alyx Dellamonica, making an analogy between figuring out how fiction works and trying to learn about cars from a junkyard. I like the junkyard analogy quite a bit, but along the way she makes a couple of passing mentions to physics that I absolutely hate. Here's the first: With the arts, you not a physics professor laying out a formula, some cut-and-dried procedure for which there is one satisfactory answer. You’re not showing someone how to paint the perfect yellow line down the middle of a strip of road, or fly an ai...

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE ______________________________________________________________ Saddam Leonardo Kap ________________________________________________________________________ You are here not because of your future but past.   _____________________________________________________ T he thing that I want to share is, let’s understand it by an example. Suppose you are A, and in past, u had a relationship with B. Now in present u have an amazing and lifelong relationship with C. Now what do u think at this point is, the relationship with B was lousy, it was meant to have vanished, and it was terrible. It happens well that that relationship never worked out. I am now too happy and I will not repeat that mistake. I want to throw that relationship as if I was sick of it like it was a dark era or something like the worst thing ever happened. Now let me stop this here and give you some deep insight into that relationship at that time. In present moment whatever you are...