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October 3, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Wendy Dang will give arguments for the two seemingly controversial claims: (1) in thermodynamics, the 2nd law alone is silent on the direction of time for non-cyclic processes (2) in statistical mechanics, it requires a cosmological principle to arrive at irreversible macrophysics from reversible microphysics

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-10-03 11:00 Wendy Dang Philosophy of thermal physics
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.