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The University of Michigan's Department of Physics hosts the annual Ta-You Wu Lecture, which is one of the most prestigious lecture events in our Department. The Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through generous gifts from the University of Michigan Alumni Association in Taiwan. It is named in honor of Michigan Physics alumnus and honorary Doctor of Science, Ta-You Wu, one of the central figures of the 20th century in the Chinese and Taiwanese physics communities.
2024 Ta-You Wu Lecture
in Physics
Professor Hirosi Ooguri (California Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo)
Constraints on Quantum Gravity
Superstring theory is currently the best candidate for the ultimate unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Although predictions of the theory are typically made at extremely high energies and beyond the reach of current experiments and observations, several non-trivial constraints have recently been found on its low-energy effective theory. Because of the unusual ultraviolet behavior of gravitational theory, the standard argument for the separation of scales does not work for gravity, leading to robust low-energy predictions of consistency requirements at high energy. For gravitational theories in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes, we can formulate such constraints and aim to prove or falsify them using the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will review recent progress in this approach and discuss examples of such constraints and their implications for low energy physics.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
3:00-4:00 PM
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre (4th Floor)
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
Seating Begins at 2:30 PM!
This was a hybrid lecture.
Watch the video of Dr. Ooguri's lecture.
Prior to the lecture, there will be a reception in the West Atrium.
The reception will begin at 2:30 p.m.
Biography
Hirosi Ooguri is the Fred Kavli Professor and Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a University Professor at the University of Tokyo. He explores mathematical structures in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and string theory, and uses them to develop theoretical tools for solving fundamental questions in physics.
After completing his graduate studies in two years, Ooguri became a tenured faculty member at the University of Tokyo in 1986. He was on the faculties at the University of Chicago, Kyoto University, and the University of California at Berkeley before joining Caltech in 2000. He has also served as President of the Aspen Center for Physics and, until this summer, as Chair of its Board of Trustees.
Ooguri has received the Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics from the American Mathematical Society, the Simons Investigator Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Award and the Hamburg Prize in Germany, and the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society.
Ooguri's popular science books have sold over 300,000 copies in Japan, and one of them won the Kodansha Prize for Science Books. He also supervised a science movie, which was selected for the Best Educational Production Award from the International Planetarium Society and has been translated into six languages.
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
915 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
The Rackham Amphitheatre is located on the fourth floor of the Rackham Building. Doors to the fourth floor Rackham Amphitheatre will open at 2:30 pm for seating. Please come early as there will be no admittance after the lecture has started!
City Parking: Maynard Street Parking Structure
324 Maynard St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Walking Map from Maynard Street to Rackham Auditorium
Questions? Contact Carol Rabuck, crabuck@umich.edu
Previous Lectures in This Series
View an assortment of past Ta-You Wu lectures on YouTube.
- 2023 (Held in January, 2024) Jocelyn Bell Burnell: The Discovery of Pulsars
- 2022 Eiichiro Komatsu: Finding Cosmic Inflation
- 2021 Nobel laureate Klaus von Klitzing: A Nocturnal Discovery that Triggered a Revolution in International Metrology
- 2020 No lecture this year due to the Covid pandemic
- 2019 Nobel laureate Donna Strickland: Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses
- 2018 Nobel laureate F. Duncan Haldane: Topological Quantum Matter, Entanglement, and a "Second Quantum Revolution"
- 2017 Nobel laureate Kip S. Thorne: Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
- 2016 David Spergel: Our Simple but Strange Universe
- 2015 Eric Betzig: Imaging Life at High Spatiotemporal Resolution
- 2014 Wendy Freedman: The Universe: Continuing Surprises
- 2014 Dennis Overbye: Confessions of a Dinosaur in the Age of New Media
- 2013 Nobel laureate David Wineland: Superposition, Entanglement, and Raising Schrödinger's Cat
- 2012 No lecture this year
- 2011 Gérard Mourou, Former Director of the Laboratoire d’ Optique Appliquée at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avancée & Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (France): Laser-Based High Energy Physics
- 2010 Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting: An Experiment to Explore the Mysteries of Space: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
- 2009 Helen Quinn: Wandering Planets, Falling Apples, Curving Spaces, Whirling Stars: How Unraveling the Mysteries of Gravity Has Taught Us About the Universe.
- 2008 Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek: The Universe is a Strange Place
- 2007 100th Birthday Celebration of the late Ta-You Wu: Distinguished Lecturer, Frank H. Shu, The Formation of Stars and Planetary Systems
- 2006 Nobel laureate Eric A. Cornell: Is Warm Glass More Sticky Than Cold Glass? Temperature and Casimir Force
- 2005 Nobel laureate Anthony J. Leggett: Does the Everyday World Really Obey Quantum Mechanics?
- 2004 Nobel laureate David J. Gross: Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD (Or How I Won the Nobel Prize)
- 2003 Sir Martin Rees: Where is Cosmology Going?
- 2002 David Wilkinson (1935-2002): The Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation
- 2001 Freeman Dyson: Is Life Analog or Digital?
- 2000 Nobel laureate Horst L. Stormer: Fractional Electronic Charges and other Tales from Flatland
- 1999 Nobel laureate Steven Chu: Seeing and Holding onto Atoms and Biological Molecules
- 1998 Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010): Fractals and Scale-Invariant Roughness in
the Sciences - 1997 Paul C. W. Chu: The Path of Zero Resistance
- 1996 Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932-2007): Principles of Adhesion
- 1995 Nobel laureate T. D. Lee: Symmetry and Asymmetry
- 1994 Nobel laureate Joseph Taylor: Binary Pulsars and Relativistic Gravity
- 1993 Abraham Pais (1918-2000): George Uhlenbeck Remembered
- 1992 Nobel laureate C. N. Yang: Considerations on Carbon 60
