Martin Bojowald

Martin Bojowald (born February 18, 1973 in Jülich ) is a German physicist . Bojowald applied loop quantum gravity to the cosmological beginning. With Big Bounce , he represents a model that deviates from the Big Bang theory. Bojowald researches and teaches at Pennsylvania State University .

Life

Martin Bojowald completed his Abitur in 1992 at the Stiftisches Gymnasium in Düren . He then studied physics at the Technical University of Aachen with a diploma in 1998 with Hans A. Kastrup . At Kastrup, he received his doctorate in 2000 with a dissertation on quantum geometry and symmetry as a fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft -Graduiertenkolleg Strong and electroweak interactions at high energies . From 2000 to 2003, he worked as a post-doctoral student at the Center for Gravitation and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in the USA . Between 2003 and 2005 he was a Junior Staff Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm near Potsdam . In 2006, he became Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos (IGC) at Pennsylvania State University with Abhay Vasant Ashtekar , one of the pioneers of loop quantum gravity. He has been an Associate Professor there since 2009 .

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Bojowald deals with the topics of loop quantum gravity (SQG, Loop Quantum Gravity) and physical cosmology . He became known for the application of the SQG to cosmological problems. As part of the SQG, he developed a theory according to which the universe already existed before the Big Bang, which in the usual cosmological models of general relativity is a singularity at which the description of general relativity reaches its limits. Like in an upside-down balloon (Bojowald used this picture in an interview with Die Zeit ), but the directions of space and time would be inverted and you would be dealing with a contracting universe beyond the Big Bang. According to Bojowald, the new aspect added by the SQG is a repulsive behavior ( bounce ) of gravity at small distances in the area of ​​the Planck dimensions . As part of his model, Bojowald also gave a new interpretation of the inflation theory of the universe.

Publications

• Absence of a Singularity in Loop Quantum Gravity. In: Physical Review Letters, Vol. 86, pp. 5227-5230, 2001.
• Inflation from Quantum Geometry. In: Physical Review Letters, Vol. 89, p. 261301, 2002.
• Loop Quantum Cosmology. In: Living Reviews 2008
• Forget the big bang. Now it's the big bounce. (Co-author). Scientific American, October 2008.
• The original leap of space. Spectrum of Science, May 2009, pp. 26–32. (PDF; 828 kB, 7 pages)
• Back before the big bang. The whole history of the universe. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-003910-1 .
• Canonical Gravity and Applications - Cosmology, Black Holes, and Quantum Gravity. Cambridge University Press 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-19575-1 .
• Quantum Cosmology. A Fundamental Description of the Universe. Lecture Notes in Physics, Springer 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-8276-6 .
• Back to the beginning of quantum spacetime. In: Physics Today 66, March 2013. (PDF; 793 kB, 8 pages)

Awards and mentions

• April 1995 – June 1998: German National Academic Foundation
• Portrait in Nature magazine , January 2005
• Xanthopoulos Prize 2007 from the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation
• NSF Career Award 2008: "Effective Descriptions in Cosmology"
• Teaching Award 2009, Penn State Society of Physics Students

Web links

• Literature by and about Martin Bojowald in the catalog of the German National Library
• Martin Bojowald on the Penn State University website . (English)
• Johann Grolle: A time before our world . In: Der Spiegel 14/2009.
• Robert Czepel: What happened before the Big Bang? In: ORF science .
• Max Rauner: The Universe turned inside out . Interview. In: Die Zeit 01/2009.
• Quirin Schiermeier: The long-distance thinker . In: Nature No. 433, January 2005. (English)
• Harald Zaun : The general theory of relativity fails on the singularity! Interview. In: Telepolis , June 29, 2009.
• Background independence and quantum gravity