Colloquium time! Grab some coffee, cookies, and fruit at the pre-talk reception in the Physics Library at 3pm, then stick around for an exciting talk at 3:30 PM. Everyone’s welcome—faculty, grads, and undergrads alike!

After his departure, a legend began to build about Maxwell's time at Trinity College, Cambridge. The story went that he would toss cats from school windows to watch them land upright on their padded paws. (This was not so.) I will describe the true fascination that Maxwell, and many physicists after him, have had with falling cats. Indeed, a falling cat is a remarkably accessible example of a gauge theory and turns out to be mathematically identical to a model of the simplest grain of space used in loop quantum gravity. Insights garnered from this model are allowing us to create detailed pictures of the tunneling of quantum geometry in quantum gravity. This new realm of application for quantum tunneling is unexpected and rich, already lending new perspectives on quantum gravity. I aim to build upon these simpler models to describe the late stages of the evaporation of black holes and the possibility of their quantum metamorphosis into white holes. - Dr. Hal Haggard