Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology

This rather imposing collection of papers, published a few years back to celebrate Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday, will reduce your disposable income by £50. Hence, as a service to the destitute, I here provide a list of contents with hyperlinks to all the freely downloadable articles.

1. Introduction;
Part I. Popular Symposium:
2. Our complex cosmos and its future, Martin J. Rees
3. Theories of everything and Hawking’s wave function of the Universe, Jame B. Hartle
4. The problem of space-time singularities: implications for quantum gravity? Roger Penrose
5. Warping spacetime, Kip Thorne
6. 60 years in a nutshell, Stephen W. Hawking

Part II. Spacetime Singularities:
7. Cosmological perturbations and singularities, George F. R. Ellis
8. The quantum physics of chronology protection, Matt Visser
9. Energy dominance and the Hawking–Ellis vacuum conservation theorem, Brandon Carter
10. On the instability of extra space dimensions, Roger Penrose

Part III. Black Holes:
11. Black hole uniqueness and the inner horizon stability problem, Werner Israel
12. Black holes in the real universe and their prospects as probes of relativistic gravity, Martin J. Rees
13. Primordial black holes, Bernard Carr
14. Black hole pair creation, Simon F. Ross
15. Black holes at accelerators, Steven Giddings

Part IV. Hawking Radiation:
16. Black holes and string theory, Malcolm Perry
17. M theory and black hole quantum mechanics, Joe Polchinski
18. Playing with black strings, Gary Horowitz
19. Twenty years of debate with Stephen, Leonard Susskind

Part V. Quantum Gravity:
20. Euclidean quantum gravity: the view from 2002, Gary Gibbons
21. Zeta functions, anomalies and stable branes, Ian Moss
22. Some reflections on the status of conventional quantum theory when applied to quantum gravity, Chris Isham
23. Quantum geometry and its ramifications, Abhay Ashtekar
24. Topology change in quantum gravity, Fay Dowker

Part VI. M Theory and Beyond:
25. The past and future of string theory, Edward Witten
26. String theory, David Gross
27. A brief description of string theory, Michael Green
28. The story of M, Paul Townsend
29. Gauged supergravity and holographic field theory, Nick Warner
30. 57 varieties in a NUTshell, Chris Pope

Part VII. de Sitter Space:
31. Adventures in de Sitter space, Raphael Bousso
32. de Sitter space in non-critical string theory, Andrew Strominger
33. Supergravity, M theory and cosmology, Renata Kallosh

Part VIII. Quantum Cosmology:
34. The state of the universe, James B. Hartle
35. Quantum cosmology, Don Page
36. Quantum cosmology and eternal inflation, A. Vilenkin
37. Probability in the deterministic theory known as quantum mechanics, Bryce de Witt
38. The interpretation of quantum cosmology and the problem of time, J. Halliwell
39. What local supersymmetry can do for quantum cosmology, Peter D’Eath

Part IX. Cosmology:
40. Inflation and cosmological perturbations, Alan Guth
41. The future of cosmology: observational and computational prospects, Paul Shellard
42. The ekpyrotic universe and its cyclic extension, Neil Turok
43. Inflationary theory versus the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario, Andrei Linde
44. Brane (new) worlds, Pierre Binetruy

No comments: