EVENTI
Nell'ambito del Dottorato in Fisica e Nanoscienze - Universita’ del Salento, mercoledì 26 novembre 2025 alle ore 16:00, in aula Magna, il Prof. Steven Balbus (OXFORD UNIVERSITY - Emeritus Savillan Professor of Physics) terrà una lezione sulla piattaforma ZOOM dal titolo:
NEW RESULTS IN GENERAL RELATIVITY
ABSTRACT: Despite a century of attention from many of the worlds’s best physicists, the riches of general relativity — even in its classical form—have yet to be exhausted. In this lecture, I will present some recent work which revisits such stalwarts as the equivalence principle and periastron advance, then move on to simplified presentations of normally mathematically cumbersome problems, to new simple orbits around Kerr black holes, to a novel heuristic for understanding Hawking-Unruh radiation (the word “classical” is honoured in the breach here), and if time permits, other results as well. The problems are presented pedagogically and each is self-contained, and many are directly relevant for current astronomical research.
Before coming to Oxford, Prof. Balbus had been Professeur des Universités in the Physics Department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris for nine years. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took BS degrees in both mathematics and physics, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he obtained his PhD in theoretical astrophysics. He has also held academic posts at Princeton University, MIT, and the University of Virginia. Prof. Balbus's field of study is astrophysical fluid dynamics, with a particular interest in the behaviour of magnetised gases. He has made widely-recognised contributions to our understanding of accretion discs, dilute gases, and the interior of the Sun.
Prof. Balbus is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He shared the 2013 Shaw Prize in Astronomy with John Hawley for his work on accretion disc turbulence. He was awarded the 2020 Eddington Medal from the RAS, and the Dirac Medal and Prize from the IoP in 2021.
He has been head of Astrophysics at Oxford.
Link ZOOM: https://infn-it.zoom.us/meetings/83515795644/invitations?signature=6ribFLWCHpL91Fq9hD4cYZkQ_mpZe2fVDfMt8vXtvxU