About The Speaker

William G. Unruh is a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia, known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of gravity, black holes, cosmology, quantum fields in curved spaces, and the foundations of quantum mechanics, including the discovery of the Unruh effect. Professor Unruh was the first Director of the Cosmology and Gravity Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (1985-1996). His many awards include the Rutherford Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (1982), the Herzberg Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists (1983), the Steacie Prize from the National Research Council (1984), the Canadian Association of Physicists Medal of Achievement (1995), and the Canada Council Killam Prize. Professor Unruh is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Event Details

Since Schwarzschild, in 1915/1916, discovered the metric that bears his name in the mathematics of Einstein's brand new theory, confusion reigned in understanding the Schwarzscild "singularity" at r=2GM/c^2. Was this some sort of matter shell? Was this a breakdown of the theory? This talk will be a historical tour of the slow, 35 year or more, realisation of what this singularity was and what it implied for the theory, and the frustratingly clear (to us) of "roads not taken" in that journey.