Don Page (physicist)

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Don Page
Stephen W. Hawking
Websitewww.ualberta.ca/science/about-us/contact-us/faculty-directory/don-n,-d-,-page

Don Nelson Page FRSC (born December 31, 1948) is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada.[1][2][3]

Work

Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him.[4][5] Page got his BA at

Caltech.[6]

His professional career started as a research assistant in Cambridge from 1976-1979, followed by an assistant professorship at

Penn State from 1979-1983, and then an associate professor at Penn State until 1986 before taking on the title of professor in 1986. Page spent four more years at Penn State before moving to become a professor at the University of Alberta
in Canada in 1990.

In 1993, he argued that if a black hole starts in a pure quantum state and evaporates completely by a unitary process, the von Neumann entropy of the Hawking radiation initially increases and then decreases back to zero when the black hole has disappeared.[7] This is known as the Page curve, and the turnover point of the curve the Page time.[8][9]

Awards and honors

In 2012, Page became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.[10]

Religious views

Page is an

Kalam Cosmological Argument
, saying that it "is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions [i.e. the first premise] we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time."

References

  1. ^ "Don Page - University of Alberta". Archived from the original on 2013-09-27. Retrieved 2013-09-23.
  2. ^ "Achieve Magazine". Archived from the original on 2015-02-13. Retrieved 2015-02-12.
  3. ^ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (Jun 24, 1986). "Reports ... John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved Jun 24, 2020 – via Google Books.
  4. Wikidata Q59348104
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  8. . Glossary. Page curve: Consider a spacetime with a black hole formed by the collapse of a pure state. Surround the black hole by an imaginary sphere whose radius is a few Schwarzschild radii. The Page curve is a plot of the fine-grained entropy outside of this imaginary sphere, where we subtract the contribution of the vacuum. Since the black hole Hawking radiates and the Hawking quanta enter this faraway region, this computes the fine-grained entropy of Hawking radiation as a function of time. Notice that the regions inside and outside the imaginary sphere are open systems. The curve begins at zero when no Hawking quanta have entered the exterior region, and ends at zero when the black hole has completely evaporated and all of the Hawking quanta are in the exterior region. The "Page time" corresponds to the turnover point of the curve.
  9. .
  10. ^ "Physicist Don Page named to the Royal Society of Canada". University of Alberta. January 20, 2012. Archived from the original on November 26, 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2018.
  11. ^ "Guest Post: Don Page on God and Cosmology". March 20, 2015. Retrieved August 28, 2019.

External links