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As a satellite event of our meeting, we are thrilled to announce the organisation of a colloquium held at Institut Français de Thessalonique (French Institute of Thessaloniki), under the patronage of the French Embassy in Greece and the Consule Générale de France in Thessaloniki, Madame Cécile Walck. Please find the details below.
Ubiquitous Relativities
Speaker: Marios Petropoulos
The colloquium will be given in English.
Abstract
The word “relativity” entered the language of physics and the popular imagination with Einstein’s eponymous theory at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet the notion of a reference frame, and of measurements relative to it, goes back to Galileo (1564–1642). Galilean relativity can thus be thought of as a precursor to Einstein’s relativity, which it recovers in the limit of an infinite speed of light. In 1965, J.-M. Lévy-Leblond showed that the opposite limit is equally consistent, giving rise to a new form of relativity, known as Carrollian relativity. Long regarded as a mathematical curiosity, it has since emerged as the natural framework for gravitational radiation, whose detection ten years ago provided the ultimate experimental test of Einsteinian gravity, as predicted a century earlier, and opened the way to a new form of cosmic spectroscopy.
This lecture will present the conceptual thread connecting these different forms of relativity, as well as their implications, which are both deeply theoretical and open up new ways of exploring the Universe.
When? 29th of September 2026, at 19:00
Where? Institut Français de Thessalonique.
Leoforos Stratou 2A, 54640 Thessaloniki
Our speaker: Prof. Marios Petropoulos
Our speaker: Prof. Marios Petropoulos
Prof. Marios Petropoulos is Directeur de Recherche at CNRS, head of the Centre de Physique Théorique of École polytechnique, professor at the École polytechnique and the École normale supérieure in Paris. Born in Athens, he next grew up in Belgium where he started studying physics in Mons. He then obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in École polytechnique, under the guidance of Prof. Constantinos Bachas in 1991.
Prof. Petropoulos is a renowned expert in flat-space holography, non-Lorentzian geometries (in particular conformal Carroll structures), and the fluid/gravity correspondence. His expertise also encompasses general relativity, string theory, conformal field theory, and the dynamics of D-branes. He played an instrumental role in the renewed interest in the Carrollian approach to flat-space holography, in particular the understanding of the geometric properties of the conformal boundary and the bulk reconstruction.
Generous with his time and efforts, he is widely respected within the high-energy physics community for his talent for identifying profound and critical problems, formulating them with mathematical rigour, and deriving insightful solutions. Moreover, he is a valued lecturer and outreach speaker, in French, English or Greek, celebrated for his pedagogical skills, eloquence, and infectious passion for physics.
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