Royal Society Fellow Don Page

Dr. Don Page (physics) was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, for 2012.

In the following slides, he offers some memories of his research and travels.

A December 1978 photo of me (on the right side, with the light-colored shirt and wearing an earphone for a translation of whatever was said in Russian), at the first Moscow Quantum Gravity Seminar. There I first met Andrei Sakharov and Valeri Frolov (now the holder of the Killam Memorial Chair here in the Physics Department of the U of A; I think he is the middle person in the second row of the picture; he was one of the only Russians to give his lecture in Russian, saying that he did that so that we would have a chance to hear the Russian language) and Andrei Zelnikov (now a Research Associate here at the U of A). Several years after this 1978 meeting, Andrei Zelnikov greatly helped me at another meeting in Moscow to get a replacement passport and exit visa after I was robbed in broad daylight on a bridge in sight of the Russian White House by a gang of about 20 young gypsies who tore open my shirt to rip off a money bag with my passport, exit visa, traveler’s cheques, and money; in the middle of that night a scruffy Russian man appeared at my hotel room door with pictures of my family and an offer to return my passport for several hundred dollars, which I refused.

1988 book review in Nature of Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

The first distribution was recalled after I pointed out several mis-labellings.

Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday celebration in Cambridge in January 2002.

On the left is David Howell Evans, The Edge from the Irish rock band U2. The next slide shows a song I got to sing with The Edge while we both sang about Stephen Hawking and me. At the time I did not even know who The Edge was, and in fact I had waited for him to get out of a picture I wanted to take of Stephen Hawking and Brandon Carter, but my sons were delighted that eventually I got impatient and took the picture with The Edge in it. Later I used my picture, with help from Stephen (who took a whole hour to write a one-line cover email for my email request) to get The Edge to meet privately for five minutes with my son John and his then-fiancee (now wife as of July 7, 2012) Elizabeth when U2 performed here in Edmonton.

An excerpt from the song that Bernard Carr composed that we (including The Edge of U2) sang at Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday celebration in Cambridge in January 2002, with three mentions of me by name.

November 11, 2005

Gnarled Mountain (just to the right of the center of the photo) from a flight from Vancouver to Taiwan. I lived 1959-1966 in the Eskimo village of Manokotak, just off the left edge of the photo, where my parents taught elementary school.

I climbed the mountain as a teenager (possibly the first time anyone had bothered hiking to the top) and named it because of its “many twisted ridges on the W side giving it a gnarled appearance.� This is the earliest writing of mine that I can now find on the Web, e.g., at http://nationexplorer.com/feature/1866435.

Notes taken during a 2007 lecture by Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking's bet concession, 2007 April 23

This is an expression, using three formulas discovered by the great Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) (pronounced roughly "Oiler"), that equals 99, the number of the great Edmonton Oilers hockey player Wayne Gretzky. I have thought of putting it on a T-shirt, with the title Great Euler Number, and sending it to Gretzky, but I have never gotten around to carrying out this pipe dream.

August 9, 2009, photo of Moraine Lake and Fay Glacier from the top of Mount Temple.

The December 10 , 2010, pyroclastic eruption of the Kizimen Volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, taken 03:14 UTC from AC Flight 063, Vancouver to Seoul

This is a silly calculation I did in my head in bed the other morning as a mental exercise, I think the first time I was able to divide mentally by a three-digit prime (127) to enough decimal places that it repeated so that I could write down as many digits as I wished without more calculation. I suspect that it was the first time in human history that anyone has bothered to waste enough time to write down by hand the number of inches in a meter to more than one thousand decimal places.

What do I plan to do next?

After a request at a 2012 Nov. 30 - Dec. 1 Stanford conference on black hole "firewalls," I plan to calculate for a large black hole what people there called the "Page curve" of the time dependence (instead of the dependence on thermodynamic entropy given in this 1993 paper of mine) of the entanglement entropy of the Hawking radiation from a large black hole, which is thought to peak at what has been named the "Page time" that marks the beginning of "old age" for a black hole.

Information in black hole radiation.

Don N. Page (Alberta U.). Jun 1993. 15 pp.

Published in Phys.Rev.Lett. 71 (1993) 3743-3746 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.3743; e-Print: hep-th/9306083