Room 300, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
The rich and beautiful spacetime geometry of a Black Hole is characterised by an exotic swirling, tipping and trapping of light. A different physical perspective reveals a new face - that of a system obeying the Laws of Thermodynamics. Combining these geometrical and thermodynamic aspects with quantum mechanics leads to an exquisite tension between the three, known as the Information Loss Problem. The history of these developments in the study of black holes is no less fascinating than black holes themselves, peopled with an array of wonderful characters ranging from a German artillery soldier in the First World War to a Gandhian Satyagrahi from a small town in Gujarat, from Einstein to Penrose to Hawking. This talk intertwines the story of these characters and their role in the development of our understanding of black holes. In doing so it will touch on the notion of local and global trapping of light, the Singularity theorem, the Laws of Black Hole Thermodynamics and the phenomenon of Black Hole Evaporation.
Madhavan Varadarajan is interested in issues at the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity. His research over the last decade has resolved several longstanding foundational problems which lie at the heart of the Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) approach.
Currently a senior professor at the Raman Research Institute, he did his PhD with the Relativity Group at Syracuse University followed by Post-Doctoral Research at the University of Utah. He was elected Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation in 2010 for his "contributions to conceptually difficult and deep problems in classical and quantum gravity". He is a founding member of the Bronstein Board which administers a prestigious international postdoctoral prize in LQG and an avid field hockey player.
