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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The standard model of cosmology suggests that the universe started with a phase of very high density, described by general relativity as a singularity. Quantum gravity attempts to resolve the singularity by a more fundamental, microscopic theory whose equations remain valid and could tell us what happened at or even before the big bang. This talk reviews one approach, loop quantum gravity, and discusses several surprising new results that shed light on the structure of quantum space-time, with implications for mathematical modeling and conceptual questions in
cosmology.
