Remote Nordic HET seminar: Iberê Kuntz

Speaker: Iberê Kuntz

Title: Singularities under field redefinitions

Abstract: Singularities in General Relativity have been tormenting the community for a long time. The general belief is that only a complete theory of quantum gravity would be able to smooth them out. In this seminar, I will explore the possibility of removing singularities by field redefinitions. I will show that the Hawking-Penrose theorem is not covariant under transformations of the fields. The calculation of the field-space Kretschmann scalar, which is invariant in field space, then suggests that pure gravity is everywhere regular.