The UMD Department of Physics cordially invites you to the

Charles W. Misner Endowed Lecture in Gravitational Physics

with

Daniel Harlow
MIT

Tuesday, April 29, 2025
4 p.m. 
John S. Toll Physics Building, Room 1410

Parking is available in the Regents Drive Garage. Enter via Stadium Drive; an attendant will direct visitors within the garage. Additionally, the free #104 ShuttleUM bus runs between the College Park Metro Station and Regents Drive at about 12-minute intervals.

Questions? Contact the Department of Physics at physchair-rsvp@umd.edu or 301-405-5946.

About the Speaker
Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Associate Professor of Physics Daniel Harlow works on combining quantum mechanics and gravity, focusing on the quantum-mechanical aspects of black holes and cosmology. Recently he has been using methods from quantum information theory to approach these problems, in particular relating the AdS/CFT correspondence—our best theory of quantum gravity so far—to the theory of quantum error correcting codes. He also works on the general structure of quantum field theory, which despite its venerable age has resisted a fully satisfactory formulation, as well as aspects of classical gravity.

Harlow was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Boston and Chicago. He obtained a BA in physics and mathematics from Columbia University in 2006, a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 2012, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Harvard before joining MIT in July 2017. He is an avid hiker and pianist.

About the Lecture
The family of Professor Emeritus Charles W. Misner established the Charles W. Misner Endowed Lectureship in Gravitational Physics at the University of Maryland in 2021. Dr. Misner is a world-renowned physicist who co-authored Gravitation in 1973 with John Wheeler and Kip Thorne, a book that became the standard graduate school text on general relativity. Dr. Misner served on the faculty in UMD’s Department of Physics from 1963 until his retirement in 2000. The Misner lecture is hosted by the Department of Physics in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.