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.
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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.
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