Two weeks of fancy physics

Two intensive weeks of physics of black holes are over. This year the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor organized the "Black Holes in String Theory Workshop" which I attended. It was a very productive meeting in which most of the discussions and talks were on black holes, fuzzballs and entanglement.

Back in Cambridge on Friday I attended the Harvard Physics Postdoc Retreat which I was also co-organizing. Postdocs from all the areas of the Physics Department gave 10 minute presentations. And aside from a lot of delicious food we had also break-out (interaction) sessions and, a great trivia "science" game also scheduled for the day. Stephen Wolfram was the special guest at the Retreat's dinner (see pic below). In spite of saying that he did not remember any female physicist working in his team or that nowadays he is hiring more IT-graduates than physicists, hearing about his experience as entrepreneur was extremely interesting. In all, the meeting was a success and we are all now looking forward to the 2014 edition!

Stephen Wolfram at the Harvard Physics Postdoc Retreat dinner - 18th Oct 2013

Meanwhile at Harvard ... the last two speakers at our High Energy Theory Group Journal Club were Paul Chesler "On the instability of asymptotically AdS spacetime" and Douglas Stanford telling us about "Black Holes and Butterfly effect" based on http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1306.0622.