The September 2026 meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society will be on
Saturday, September 19, 2026
at the
Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Please note the schedule so you won't be late for pizza!
Meeting Agenda:
5:00 PM -- Astro-talk over pizza and soft drinks. (Donations are welcome to offset the cost of food and beverage.)
6:00 PM -- The lectures will begin.
7:30 PM -- After the meeting if weather permits, we will have telescopes set up to view the Moon, Venus and Saturn.
(Unfortunately, as of Wednesday, the forecast for Saturday evening is cloudy with rain)
Speaker: Dr. Joshua Burton
Topic: A Singular Approach, the physics of Black Holes
About the Presentation:
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. I 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. I 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:
Joshua Burton 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 is now teaching at our
award-winning local Proviso Mathematics and Science Academy.
Looking Ahead: The May meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society (CAS) will be on Saturday, October 17, 2026
at the Cernan Earth and Space Center at 5:00 Event Calendar
Membership: If you enjoy the activities of the CAS, please become a member.
Regular membership is only $30 for an individual and $50 for a family membership.
We now accept payment via Zelle.
Join Us!
We would like to thank the Cernan Center and its director Kris McCall for their support of the CAS and
astronomy/science education. We encourage CAS members and all others who support science education to purchase
memberships for the Cernan Center.
We would also like to thank our members for their past and continued support.
We hope that you can attend. Please feel free to forward and invite friends!
Clear Skies!
Tony Harris
V.P. and Program Manager,
Chicago Astronomical Society
