Preposterous Universe

 
We try harder

The winners of the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition have been announced. (And if you're wondering how they did it so quickly, the deadline was actually the end of March.) Links where I could find them.

Gravity Research Foundation
PO Box 81389
Wellesley Hills, MA 02481-0004

Roger W. Babson, Founder
George M. Rideout, Jr., President

The trustees are pleased to announce the Awards for Essays for 2005.

1.$3,500 The String Coupling Accelerates the Expansion of the Universe, by John Ellis*, Nikolaos E. Mavromatos+, and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos#; *TH Division, Physics Department, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland; +Theoretical Physics, Physics Department, King=E2=80=99s College London, Strand WC2R 2LS, UK; #George P. and Cynthia W. Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, Astroparticle Physics Group, (HARC), Mitchell Campus, Woodlands, TX 77381, Academy of Athens, Division of Natural Sciences, 28 Panepistimiou Avenue, Athens 10679, Greece.

2.$1,000 Does Inflation Provide Natural Initial Conditions for the Universe? by Sean M. Carroll and Jennifer Chen, Enrico Fermi Institute, Department of Physics, and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

3.$750 Gravity from Local Lorentz Violation, by V. Alan Kostelecky* and Robertus Potting+, *Physics Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; +CENTRA, Physics Department, FCT, Universidade do Algarve, 8000 Faro, Portugal.

4.$500 Gravity-Wave Detectors as Probes of Extra Dimensions, by Chris Clarkson and Roy Maartens, Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 2EG, UK.

5.$250 Classical and Quantum General Relativity: A New Paradigm, by Rodolfo Gambini* and Jorge Pullin+, *Instituto de Fisica, Facultad de Ciencias, Igua 4225, esq. Mataojo, Montevideo, Uruguay; +Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-4001.

Selected for Honorable Mention this year were (listed in alphabetical order)

D.V. Ahluwalia-Khalilova; Giovanni Amelino-Camelia; Vijay Balasubramanian, Vishnu Jejjala, and Joan Simon; Mihai Bondarescu; Xavier Calmet, Michael Graesser, and Stephen D.H. Hsu; Saulo Carneiro; F.I. Cooperstock; F. de Felice; Cedric Deffayet; Alessandro Fabbri and Jose Navarro-Salas; G.W. Gibbons, H. Lu, Don N. Page, and C.N. Pope; Yuan K. Ha; Veronika E. Hubeny, Mukund Rangamani, and Simon F. Ross; Viqar Husain and Oliver Winkler; Mark G. Jackson; David W. Kraft; Jnanadeva Maharana; M.D. Maia; Hrvoje Nikolic; T. Padmanabhan; Fabrizio Pinto; Sanjeev S. Seahra; M. P. Silverman; C. Sivaram; Dejan Stojkovic, Glenn D. Starkman, and Fred C. Adams; John Swain; Daniel R. Terno; Paul S. Wesson; G.Z. Xie and Hong-Tao Liu; Winfried Zimdahl.

Ah well, it's not whether you win or lose, and all that. In the immortal words of Geddy Lee, "Ten bucks is ten bucks, eh?" Meanwhile, Mark fills us in on why you need a smooth patch of the early universe in order to start inflation.

~ posted by Sean Carroll at 6:36 AM ~ link ~ ~ ~