Month: July 2017

Congratulations to Dr. Nosiphiwo Zwane on successfully defending her PhD thesis, entitled:

“Cosmological Tests of Causal Set Phenomenology”

Here is a picture of Nosiphiwo (right) with her two supervisors, me and Rafael Sorkin

Here is a picture of Nosiphiwo (right) with her two supervisors, me and Rafael Sorkin …

… and a close-up of the cake we’re holding, featuring a colorful causal set, with Nosiphiwo’s work on causal set predictions for dark energy history featured in the middle.  Hopefully, I will write about it later here, but in summary, it is an amazing result that shows dark energy might have been stochastic but fluctuating (i.e. everpresent) throughout cosmic history, and this is consistent with all the cosmological observations.

We wish Nosiphiwo all the best in her grand new adventures!

Congratulations to Dr. Yasaman Yazdi on successfully defending her thesis, entitled: “Entanglement Entropy of Scalar Fields in Causal Set Theory”

Featured above is the most photogenic celebratory cake that you’ll ever see, featuring Yasman’s seminal recovery of entropy “area” law for 2D causal sets, as well as a tale of our foray into firewall territory with high energy neutrinos!

Featured above, from left to right are: Don Page (Yasaman’s future postdoc advisor at Univ. of Alberta), Steve Carlip (External Examiner at Yasaman’s PhD defence), Yasman herself, myself and Rafael Sorkin (Yasman’s PhD co-supervisors), and Bill Unruh (Yasaman’s former undergraduate supervisor at Univ. of British Columbia).

To find out more about Yasaman’s impressive body of work during her PhD and MSc, ranging from Astrophysical Accretion to Entanglement Entropy and Causal Sets, check out her papers on arXiv.

The webpage of our upcoming workshop at Perimeter Institute has just gone live! It will be updated as things come along …