Events

Adam Piggott (UQ Science/Mathematics)

Romina Arroyo (The University of Queensland)

Dr Jules Lamers (The University of Melbourne)

Professor Dirk Kroese - Public Lecture

A commonly known version of the prime number theorem is that the prime number counting function pi(x) grows like x/log(x). An equivalent statement is that the Chebyshev Psi function Psi(x) grows like x. It goes back to Littlewood that the error term Psi(x) - x changes sign infinitely many times. We refine a method of Kaczorowski to give a lower bound on the number of sign changes in Psi(x) - x.

Romina Arroyo, Sara Herke, Sabrina Streipert and Sheila Williams

Enrico Gavagnin, University of Bath, United Kingdom

Ramiro Lafuente (The University of Queensland)

Matthew Simpson, Queensland University of Technology

James Osborne (University of Melbourne)

On Friday 15th March 2019, Physics Colloquium will be hosting Prof. Achim Kempf (Professor at University of Waterloo Canada & co-Chair at International Society for Relativisitc Quantum Information) discussing on prospective new methods to study the domain of cosmology, relativity and quantum theory. Following is the abstract of his talk.

Abstract. Relativity and quantum theory each required the abandoning of basic but ultimately incorrect concepts that had previously been considered self evident. Today, the fact that it is so tremendously difficult to develop quantum gravity may indicate that it will again be necessary to abandon some basic concepts, presumably concepts that seem self-evident, that sit deep and go a long way back. The difficulty is, of course, to know which concepts to abandon. How deep will we have to dig or how far back in time will we have to search for the origins of the misconceptions that may need to be overcome? I suggest we go all the way back to the stone age and question, for example, the notion of distance, as measured by measuring sticks and the like. I will argue that it is possible and may be useful for quantum gravity to replace the very notion of spacetime distance by the notion of the correlation strength of vacuum fluctuations.

Bio. Prof. Kempf was an undergraduate at the University of Heidelberg (Germany’s oldest), and he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Munich. He was a postdoc and a College Research Fellow (Corpus) at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge and a postdoc at the Institute for Fundamental Theory at University of Florida. He has been Canada Research Chair, for the Physics of Information for 10 years, he holds a University Research Chair and he is currently co-chair of the International Societry for Relativistic Quantum Information. He’s also an associate member of the IQC.

Dr Stephan Tillmann

Martin Kerin, University of Münster in Germany

Ali Eshragh (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Professor Åke Fäldt (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

Leslie Cheung, School of Mathematics and Physics