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June 1, 2020 outreach

The Story of Loop Quantum Gravity

From the Big Bounce to Black Holes: What happens at the centre black holes? What happened before the big bang? A quantum theory of gravity is needed to answer these questions . Many of the leading scientists who developed Loop Quantum Gravity, one of the most promising attempts, tell the story of how it was developed in this film. We also go on to explore how the theory may be tested via observations of black holes or probing the very early universe. The film tackles some of the biggest questions of existence.

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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.