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January 30, 2025 – January 31, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Erick Muiño, who will be presenting the talk "Do we need to postulate equal a priori probability?"

Abstract: "Statistical mechanics is built upon the postulate of equal a priori probability: in equilibrium, all microstates compatible with a given macrostate are equally probable. Despite its remarkable success, this assumption remains controversial. Several proposals suggest replacing it with quantum mechanical ideas. In this talk, I will present some arguments for abandoning this additional postulate, as it can be viewed as a consequence of entanglement."

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-01-31 14:00 Erick Muiño Do we need to postulate equal a priori probability?
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.