Join fellow Yale, MIT, and Princeton alums for the LA High Table series showcasing dynamic speakers in an intimate setting. This virtual event features Princeton professor emeritus J. Richard Gott III, who will discuss why time travel is theoretically possible.
Date: Sunday, October 24th
Time: 12:45pm – 3:00pm PDT
Location: Via Zoom. Link will be sent to all registrants prior to the event.
Price: Free
Event format: 15 mins Zoom mingling, 90 min program featuring Dr. Gott, 30 mins additional Zoom mingling
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
J. Richard Gott III is known for his work on cosmology and general relativity with much popular attention paid to his ideas on time travel. Dr. Gott grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and obtained his Bachelor's in physics at Harvard University in 1969. He then came to Princeton where he received his PhD in astrophysics in 1973. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University, Dr. Gott returned to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1976. He was on the faculty for 40 years before transitioning to emeritus status in 2016.
Dr. Gott's contributions to cosmology and general relativity include a 1972 prediction on how galaxies cluster that was subsequently confirmed by observations and has been cited over 1500 times. In 2004, he produced a "Map of the Universe" looking from Earth back to the Big Bang that appeared in numerous media outlets including the New York Times. Dr. Gott’s work on the Doomsday Hypothesis predicts that humanity has another 5,100 to 7.8 million years left before going extinct. But Dr. Gott is perhaps best known for his work on time travel -- the exact solution to Einstein's field equations he discovered in 1991 implies that if cosmic strings can move fast enough, time travel to the past may be possible.
Dr. Gott’s contributions also include the first undergraduate course on general relativity at Princeton as well as an astrophysics course for non science majors; he won Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1998. He previously ran the Peyton Observatory open house program and chaired the judging for the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search. His 2001 book “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe” was one of Booklist’s editors’ choice science books.