Session JJ01: V: Forums & GPER II

I’m a physics professor running for state house, and you should too!

As a professor of physics education research I have worked to ensure an equitable education environment for all students in pursuit of physics, astronomy, and astrophysics degrees. However, a way to push my research and advocacy even further is through participation in the law creation process. This talk will discuss my current campaign to be the next Utah state house representative in House District 24 and how I plan to use this platform to support science education at all levels. Further, I will give tips and advice to encourage audience members to take their physics degrees to their own state houses.   

Counterfactual restrictions and Bell's Theorem

We show that the ability to consider counterfactual situations is a necessary assumption of Bell's theorem, and that, to allow Bell inequality violations while maintaining all other assumptions, we just require certain measurement choices be counterfactually restricted, rather than the full removal of counterfactual definiteness. We illustrate how the counterfactual definiteness assumption formally arises from the statistical independence assumption. Counterfactual restriction therefore provides a way to interpret statistical independence violation different to what is typically assumed (i.e. that statistical independence violation means either retrocausality or superdeterminism). We tie counterfactual restriction to contextuality, and show the similarities to that approach.   

The role of A. Trautman, I. Robinson and associates in the renaissance period development of gravitational wave theory

In relation to the so-called renaissance movement in general relativity commencing in the mid-1950's we will discuss a series of papers published by Andrzej Trautman. He drew upon the slow motion approximation developed by his advisor Infeld, the general covariance based strong conservation laws enunciated by Bergmann and Goldberg, the Riemann tensor attributes explored by Goldberg and related geodesic deviation exploited by Pirani, the permissible metric discontinuities identified by Lichnerowicz, O'Brien and Synge, and finally Petrov's classification of vacuum spacetimes. With several significant additions he produced a comprehensive overview of the state of research in equations of motion and gravitational waves that was presented in a widely cited series of lectures at King's College, London, in 1958. Fundamental new contributions were the formulation of boundary conditions representing outgoing gravitational radiation, the deduction of its Petrov type, a covariant expression for null wave fronts, and a derivation of the mass loss formula due to radiation emission. This progress will be compared with the current acceptance of the quadrupole moment approach and the results of numerical integration techniques.