Chicago Astronomical Society
    
Chicago
Astronomical
Society
...to promote the interest in, and advance the knowledge and understanding of
astronomy, the most ancient and the noblest of the physical sciences.
The next meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society will be on
Saturday, December 7
at the
Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Meeting Agenda:

Speaker: Dr. Joshua Burton
Topic: A Singular Approach
About the Presentation:
Chicago Astronomical Society A Singular Approach -- Dynamics is the study of how things move in space and time, whereas geometry is space and time itself, the canvas on which dynamics unfolds. But in Einstein's general theory of relativity, geometry itself becomes dynamic: the canvas is an active part of the picture! Where gravity is strong enough, direction and duration have only local meaning and depend on where you are and how you are moving. One of the few general relativity problems we can solve exactly is the Schwarzschild metric, representing an ideal eternal black hole. The sky that you would see when falling into such a black hole, or when orbiting it at a not-too-safe distance, or during a fatal one-way infall, is both surprising and instructive. Dr. Burton will use this visual example to talk about bad coordinates (like a compass rose at the north pole) and bad geometry (like a contour map of an overhanging cliff) and show how each plays a role in our understanding of extreme spacetime. He will then talk a little bit about real-world black holes -- their birth, their possible death, and their relevance to the ultimate fate of life, the universe and everything.

About our Speaker:
Dr. Joshua Burton who earned his Ph.D. in 1990 from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Mary K. Gaillard and Bruno Zumino during the exciting early years of supergravity and string theory. He has held research appointments at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern, publishing original work on supersymmetry, particle astrophysics, cosmology, and high-energy physics beyond the Standard Model. In 1997, a friend's start-up company lured him away from academia into software, and through acquisition he eventually wound up at IBM. He retired in 2016 to return to his true calling as a physics educator, and now teaches physics and runs the astronomy club at our award-winning local Proviso Mathematics and Science Academy.