University takes quantum leap… into a black hole

It's a shame how not that many of us are (I'm guessing) terribly clued-up on the ins and outs of Quantum Physics. 

Because if we were, the announcement of an upcoming three-day conference - taking place at the Old University Building, Valletta -  will probably make you whoop for joy. 

'Black Holes: From Quantum To Gravity' will gather 200 of the world's finest scientists working in the famously obscure field of Quantum Mechanics between 24-26 April. 

The topics under discussion will include: 'Quantum Theory without Observers', 'Effective Descriptions of Complex Systems', 'Quantum Theory meets Relativity' and 'From Theory to Experiments'.

Some of the big names reading at the conference will be Joseph Silk (UK), Jean Bricmont (Belgium), GianCarlo Ghirardi (Italy), Greg Lansberg (USA) and Markus Arndt (Austria). 

Silk is an astronomer who graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, England 1963 with a BA in Mathematics. Since January 1999, he has occupied the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford. Silk boasts over 500 publication - assorted across various publications including Nature and Science - as well as three books: On the Shores of the Unknown: A Short History of the Universe, The Big Bang and Cosmic Enigmas. 

Bricmont's accomplishments span across various fields. He is a theoretical physicist and a philosopher of science, who is known beyond the scientific world due to his non-scientific prose - chief of which was his 1997 book (co-written with Alan Sokal), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, which attacks the postmodern tendency amongst academics to appropriate scientific terms and concepts, often inaccurately. 

Ghirardi is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Trieste University and Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics. His research interests cover various topics: Quantum scattering theory, Symmetries in quantum Theories, Algebraic Methods, S-matrix theory, Decay processes.

Landsberg - who has been lecturing at Brown university from 1998 - does research in elementary particle physics, specifically experimental investigation of the fundamental particles and fields at the energy frontier accelerators. 

Arndt is a professor of physics at the University of Vienna. He received his doctoral degree from the LMU Munich in 1994 under supervision by T. W. Hänsch. 

In addition to the conference, a public lecture will be held on 24 April at Europe House, St Paul's Street, Valletta which will aim to break down the tangled web of Quantum Theory to its bare essentials. 

Delivered by Dr Angelo Bassi (University of Trieste) and Dr Silke Britzen (Max-Planck-Institut), 'Quantum Mechanics and the Nature of Reality' will cut to the root of field's most pertinent question: 'what are we made of? What are particles, atoms, molecules ... what are we, as physical systems?'