In most of my research time today I talked with our new NSF postdoc Gabe Perez-Giz (NYU) about his plans for his first year here. These include working through a set of challenging and fundamental problems in numerical methods for computing gravitational radiation. Part of this plan is to produce a quantitative description of test-particle phase space (qualitative orbit properties) around Kerr (spinning) black holes. I think this is a great idea, but it involves a huge amount of literature review, synthesis, and computation.
At lunch, the CCPP brown-bag series was kicked off by Kleban (NYU) who told us about natural properties of the cosmological constant in M-theory. The idea is that one natural (or mathematically equivalent) way of thinking about the cosmological constant is as a high-dimensional analog of electromagnetism, with a vacuum field value. This gets all the stringy or M-y properties of the cosmological constant: Huge number of possible vacua, finite probabilities of transitioning to other (much worse) vacua, no non-trivial dynamics in the cosmological constant sector (except for vacuum-changing dynamics).
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