Finally I had to leave Berlin. My first stop on the way over to Melbourne was at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard in Boston. Besides the fact that i had one of the most interesting accommodation i got to experience so far i ended up discussing more about the philosophy of science within these 7 days then I did within the 4 years of my PhD. I learned (ignorance is bliss) that apparently there is still no satisfactory resolution to the measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics… guess “shut up and calculate” is a valid strategy as long as it gives answers that match experimental results. Martin Lesourd explained to me that apparently evaporating black hole space times are causally fucked up. Further I had the chance to follow an interesting talk by Beatrice Bonga about a common mistake made in the calculation of angular momentum carried by radiating fields in GR.
Last but not least i had the opportunity to present our paper on the information content of a black holes shadow in the group meeting of Ramesh Narayan’s group.
The Black Hole Initiative is a really interesting Institution as it brings together people from various branches of Physics working on topics related to black holes ranging from observations to pure mathematics and philosophy. (In the light of the fact that the Albert Einstein Institute seems to be moving towards being mono-thematical on Gravitational Waves the Black Hole Initiative fills an important role)