Welcome to www.emergentgravity.org

 What is special about this site?

Although there are many other physics forums, online encyclopedias and e-Print archives, this website focuses exclusively on issues related to Quantum Gravity (QG) and is designed for and by scientists. On our site it is possible to:

• Create a user account and add your research profile
• Keep informed in our newsletter about quantum gravity, preprints and publications
• Add and comment on publications, books and events
• Start and reply to discussions in the forum
• Help create a collection of high level QG-research overviews
• Advertise and search for jobs within the quantum gravity community
• Add and find upcoming events in our calendar

Why did we call it emergentgravity.org and why now?

This website facilitates communication between practitioners in different branches of quantum gravity. In particular we are supporting the idea that quantum gravity may be conceptually related to other branches of physics. One of the pioneers of the subject was Andrei Sakharov, who in 1968 proposed the concept of induced or emergent gravity [1]. Besides his scientific excellence Andrei Sakharov was an human rights activist and in 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. We would like to dedicate this website in his honor and hope that this project not only bridges spatial but also cultural differences between scientists all over the world.

The timing of the launch of our website could not be any better: People have recently started black hole experiments using fluid dynamics (Unruh 1981 [2]); applying insights obtained from critical phenomena to gravity (Horava in 2009 [3]); and only a few weeks ago it has been suggested to revisit Jacobson's idea that gravity might be an entropic force [4], [5]. Even these few isolated examples demonstrate the interest and ongoing developments happening in interdisciplinary quantum gravity research.

Who is behind emergentgravity.org?

The website is hosted on a server belonging to the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). The project is financially supported through Bill Unruh's grant. Together with Piyush Jain, who is currently holding a postdoctorial position at the University of Alberta (Canada), Bill Unruh and myself (Silke Weinfurtner) have built and maintain this site without external help. 

Please, let us know if you encounter any difficulties in using EmergentGravity.org, and/or have any suggestions and comments that may help us improve the site.

How is this website related to the conference Emergent Gravity IV?

Historically this project is an extension of the website for the workshop on Emergent Gravity IV  which was held in Vancouver (Canada) in August 2009, the fourth of a series of conferences on the subject. Naturally, we provide links to these conferences under the Conferences Series section (see the right hand menu) and here we link to the original conference website for Emergent Gravity IV. We have also uploaded presentations and conference pictures. We intend to provide links to other conferences which focus on interdisciplinary quantum gravity proposals, and we will offer webspace and support for conferences that continue the Emergent Gravity series.

How does the registration process work?

To register please click here. After submitting the required information you will recieve an email with instructions on how to activate your account. As this is not an automated process it might take one or two days. Thank you for your patience.

We look forward to seeing how this website will be received by our community and we warmly welcome our friends, collaborators and colleagues to join www.emergentgravity.org.

Thanks for visiting our website!
Piyush Jain
Bill Unruh
Silke Weinfurtner

About our logo

The logo was designed by Bill Unruh using gimp and was inspired by some of the pop-art of Bridget Riley. It represents water flowing over a two step waterfall, both two spatial dimensionally and with time running from the left to right. At the front edge of the ledge is a analog of a black hole horizon, and the back edge (where the flow goes from vertical to horizontal) is the analog of a white hole horizon. The small bumps represent sound waves which converge toward the white hole horizon, and diverge from the black hole horizon.

References