Jolyon Bloomfield

Biography

Jolyon received his undergraduate degree in physics from the Australian National University in 2006. He then moved to the US for his PhD in theoretical physics at Cornell University, New York, which he concluded in January 2013. After a brief time as a Postdoctoral research associate at Cornell, he joined the MIT department as a lecturer in the Fall of 2013. He presently teaches 8.022, and is also involved with the development of TEAL courses.

Research Interest

"My research is mainly focused on investigating modifications to gravity. Using the language of general relativity, I try to understand what modifications to gravity are possible, and how the universe would work given those modifications. Modifications to gravity will typically change how the universe gravitates at either high or low energies. It's fairly easy to modify gravity in the intermediate regime, but if you do so, our solar system wouldn't work, which is a fairly strong constraint on such theories. There are a few reasons to want to investigate theories of gravity other than Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. The first is in pursuit of dark energy, a completely unknown component of the universe defined only by its responsibility for causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate recently in the cosmological history. To mimic this behavior requires a modification to gravity on very low energy scales. The second is that we have good reason to believe that gravity has to break down at extremely high energies (the Planck scale), and furthermore, there are some problems in particle physics (in particular, the hierarchy problem) that might be resolved by modifying gravity on small scales"