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AMS Sectional Meeting Special Lecture



Program |  Deadlines | Inquiries:  meet@ams.org

2007 Fall Eastern Section Meeting
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
New Brunswick, NJ, October 6—7, 2007
Meeting #1031

Associate secretary:
Lesley M. Sibner, AMS, lsibner@duke.poly.edu


IMPORTANT PROGRAM INFORMATION

TRAFFIC DELAYS: If you are planning to attend the Einstein Lecture by Sir Roger Penrose in Scott Hall please plan to allow extra drive time to avoid being late or missing the Lecture. The Rutgers BIG EAST Conference football game is on Saturday with kickoff set for 8:00 p.m. This is a very big event and may cause some serious traffic congestion and delays.

Parking is available in Lots # 8, 11, and 16, near Scott Hall, without charge.

The next Einstein Lecture will be given by Sir Roger Penrose, University of Oxford, Saturday, October 6, 2007, at 8:00 p.m., in Scott Hall. The title of his lecture will be Spacetime Conformal Geometry, and a New Extended Cosmology. Click here for more information.

Abstract: The conformal geometry of spacetime (defined, in effect, by the 9 ratios of the 10 metric components), being equivalent to the location of the light cones, is more primitive than the metric structure. Certain parts of physics respond only to this conformal geometry, these becoming dominant both at the "Big Bang" and in the remote future, allowing conformal extensions both to the past and future. A proposed new cosmology takes advantage of this remarkable fact, providing a scheme which unites three of the most puzzling aspects of modern cosmology: (1) the extreme specialness of the initial Big-Bang state underlying the second law of thermodynamics, (2) the presence of a positive cosmological constant (or "dark energy"), and (3) the presence of a mysterious dark matter which dominates the mass of the universe.

Inquiries:  meet@ams.org