Raymond and Beverly Sackler
Visiting Astrophysicist Program
CITA received a generous gift from the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation to endow the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Visiting Astrophysicist Program. Each year CITA invites an internationally distinguished scholar conducting research in theoretical astrophysics to give two lectures at the University of Toronto. The researcher also meets informally with faculty and postdoctoral fellows at CITA as well as researchers and students in the Department of Astronomy and other departments. The visit is intended to be the highlight of the academic year at CITA.
The fourteenth Sackler lecture, titled "The World as Hologram", was delivered by Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford University on June 28, 2011. He discussed how the struggle to reconcile Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum theory has resulted in fundamentally new notions about how space, time and matter are to be understood. In particular he discussed the idea that the world is "holographic" in the sense that data on a two-dimensional screen can describe all the information in any three-dimensional volume. His technical lecture was delivered the previous day on the "Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics".
Prof. Susskind is one of the world's most influential theoretical physicists and the man who coined the term "cosmic landscape". His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. Prof. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, having, with Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen, independently introduced the idea that particles could in fact be states of excitation of a relativistic string. He was the first to introduce the idea of the string theory landscape in 2003.
He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. He is a recipient of numerous prizes including the science writing prize of the American Institute of Physics and the J.J. Sakurai Prize. He is the author of two popular science books, The Cosmic Landscape and The Black Hole War.
Previous Sackler Lecturers
| 2009-2010 | Jerry Ostriker | Professor, Princeton University |
|---|---|---|
| 2008-2009 | Roger Blandford | Director, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University |
| 2007-2008 | Kip Thorne | Fenyman Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology |
| 2006-2007 | Scott Tremaine | Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton |
| 2005-2006 | Rashid Sunyaev | Director, Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik, Germany |
| 2004-2005 | Christopher McKee | Professor, University of California, Berkeley |
| 2003-2004 | George Efstathiou | Professor, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge |
| 2002-2003 | Andrei Linde | Professor of Physics, Stanford University |
| 2001-2002 | John N. Bahcall | Black Professor of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton |
| 2000-2001 | P.J.E. Peebles | Einstein Professor of Science, Princeton University |
| 1999-2000 | Frank Shu | University Professor, University of California at Berkeley |
| 1998-1999 | Peter Goldreich | Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics, Caltech |
| 1997-1998 | Martin J. Rees | Royal Society Research Professor, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge; Astronomer Royal |
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