Vatican Observatory conference on black holes and gravity

A total of 40 scientists, cosmologists, physicists and Nobel laureates will meet this June at the Vatican Astronomical Observatory (also called Specola), to reflect on black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities.

“What is the true nature of space and time? How can the laws of Quantum Mechanics be reconciled with Einstein’s General Relativity that governs the behavior of the gravitational field in the first moments of the Universe, the Big Bang? What do space-time singularities tell us about the nature of our Universe?”

Experts will answer these and other questions during the scientific conference that the Vatican will host in Castel Gandolfo between June 16 and 21 in honor of the legacy of Georges Lemaître, the Belgian scientist who developed what we know today as the “Big Bang” theory. ” and “the priest who corrected Einstein.”

Conference participants include Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Roger Penrose; cosmologists and theoretical physicists Andrei Linde, Joseph Silk, Wendy Freedman, Licia Verde, CumrunVafa and Fields Medal winner Edward Witten.

The event, presented this June 11 at the Holy See Press Office, aims to “foster a fruitful interaction between scholars of theoretical and observational cosmology.”

Topics for discussion will range “from the strain on measurements of the Hubble constant, through the enigmatic nature of space-time singularities (including Big Bangs and black holes),” to gravitational waves and “ fascinating search for quantum gravity and its connections with entanglement and the foundations of quantum theory.”

The conference will also have the support of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, one of the most important public research institutes in Italy, and the conclusions of the symposium will be presented to the public in the Italian municipality of Albano Laziale, on the afternoon of Friday, June 21. .

The scientific legacy of Georges Lemaître

During this Thursday’s briefing, they recalled Lemaître’s well-known studies on the singularities of black holes, such as his theory of the “primordial atom”, known today as the “Big Bang” theory.

The priest also understood that the expansion of the Universe implied “that at some point in the past, the Universe must have gone through a state of very high energy density, like a primordial atom from which everything began.” Furthermore, the study of it can be considered the precursor of modern quantum gravity.