Wilson-Gerow Recognized With Aspen Center for Physics Honor

Time and space can be bent and warped at the quantum level. Carnegie Mellon University’s Jordan Wilson-Gerow is learning to understand how.

“Clocks and rulers sound like silly things to study in 2025,” Wilson-Gerow said. “But understanding how observers and measurements work when spacetime is also allowed to warp and bend is fundamentally important for our understanding of quantum gravity.”

Wilson-Gerow, a presidential postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon, studies gravitational waves, black hole dynamics and fluid mechanics as a member of the high energy physics group. He joined Carnegie Mellon in September 2024 after serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Previously, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.

“I had a number of offers from top institutions both inside the U.S. and in Europe, but ultimately it was obvious that CMU would be best for me,” he said. “What CMU had that sold me, was a theoretical physics group, which I could see myself seamlessly fitting into and learning a lot from.”

Members of the CMU’s theoretical physics group have broad and deep understandings of Quantum Field Theory, he said, and the group applies that knowledge to a broad range of physics, and each member works in more than one area.

“The multidisciplinary nature of this group is certainly inspired by the most tenured member of our group, Professor Ira Rothstein, who is perhaps the most diverse in his interests,” Wilson-Gerow said. “As a graduate student I studied Ira’s papers, and as a postdoc at Caltech I got to meet Ira during a visit and collaborate with him on gravitational wave physics. Ira's influence on my career before I even joined CMU is hard to overstate.”

Rothstein said that the group is really fortunate to have him.

“His intellectual curiosity makes him stand out among his peers. It is such a pleasure to talk physics with him, he has a contagious enthusiasm for physics,” he said. “When you talk to him, you know you’re getting valuable information. I have tremendous confidence in Jordan’s scientific abilities as well as his teaching skills. He has a very bright future.”

Wilson-Gerow recently delivered at talk at the Aspen Center for Physics winter conference on “Observables in Quantum Gravity: From Theory to Experiment.” He discussed a phenomenon where a quantum superposition when placed near a black hole’s event horizon will rapidly lose its quantum properties.

“Einstein taught us that there are no preferred ‘coordinates’ (x,y,z,t) in space and time once gravity gets involved, so talking about distances, durations, and localized measurements can be subtle,” he said.

For example, external clocks and rulers can be used to measure the properties of a material. But, you can't use something "outside" of space time, so describing where and when things are happening is particularly challenging in quantum gravity.

“By focusing instead on the actual measurements of a would-be observer near a black hole we were able to learn new things about the quantum environment of black holes, and how it can be inhospitable to delicate quantum superpositions,” he said.

For his efforts, Wilson-Gerow was honored with the Aspen Center for Physics’ Martin and Beate Block Winter Award. The award is given in recognition of outstanding achievements by a promising young physicist and acknowledges both the best talk given at the conference by a junior researcher and the body of work of a junior researcher who most represents the fundamental idea behind the conference.

The Martin and Beate Block Winter Award was established in 2005, by the friends and family of Martin and Beate Block, in honor of their 80th birthday. Martin Block is the founder of the Aspen Center for Physics winter conferences, the first of which was held in 1985.