The
Archives of the Eastern Gravity Meeting
The inaugural
conference was hosted by
Penn State University (Sate College, PA): New Voices in Relativity
and Quantum Gravity (the 4th Annual Penn State
Conference), in November 1996. Here
is a copy of Lee Smolin’s description of the meeting as it appears
in Matters of Gravity of
February 1997.
Penn State
Meeting
Lee Smolin
Penn State
smolin@phys.psu.edu
On November 8-10, at University Park, the
Fourth Annual Penn State Conference took place. This year's conference
was titled ``New voices in relativity and quantum gravity'' and
featured plenary speakers that were at the postdoctoral level in their
careers. It also had short oral contributions in the afternoons which
were allotted in a first-come, first-serve basis, much along the model
of the Pacific Coast and Midwest meetings.
The plenary speakers were Greg Cook (Cornell),
Simonetta Frittelli (Pittsburgh), Gabriela González (MIT-LIGO),
Juan Maldacena (Rutgers), Hans-Peter Nollert (Penn State), Amanda Peet
(Princeton), Thomas Thiemann (Harvard).
Between them they discussed new developments
in gravitational physics, on both the quantum and classical side.
González told us about the status of the construction of the
LIGo detectors, while Cook and Nollert reviewed the status of
calculations to model astrophysical events such as colliding black
holes that may provide signals for LIGO. The important new developments
in string theory, that have made it possible to compute the entropies
of extermal and near extremal black holes were the subjects of the
talks by Maldecena and Peet. Thomas Thiemann described his recent work
in non-perturbative quantum gravity which results in the construction
of at least one version of quantum general relativity, while Frittelli
described the work of herself and her collaborators which leads to a
reformulation of general relativity in terms of the dynamics of null
surfaces.
There were also a large number (41!) of
contributed talks, spanning most areas of interest in relativity.
Part of the idea of the meeting was to launch
in the East a series of meetings of similar spirit to that of the
Midwest and Pacific Coast meetings. The next such conference will be
organized in Syracuse University next year.
The Meetings
| EGM1 | 1996 | Penn State U |
| EGM2 | 1998 | Syracuse U |
| EGM3 | 1999 | Cornell U |
| EGM4 | 2000 | Duquesne U |
| EGM5 | 2002 | Embry-Riddle Aeronautical U |
| EGM6 | 2003 | U of Maryland |
| EGM7 | 2004 | Bowdoin College |
| EGM8 | 2005 | Wake Forest U |
| EGM9 | 2006 | MIT |
| EGM10 | 2007 | Cornell U |
| EGM11 | 2008 | Penn State U |
| EGM12 | 2009 | RIT |
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Last Updated: January 27, 2009