The first position out of the three Annual Buchalter Cosmology Prizes for 2016 goes to Dr. Nima khosravi, faculty member of the Department of Physics, Shahid Beheshti University. The prize amounts to 10000 U.S. Dollars in recognition of Dr. Khosravi’s paper, “Ensemble Average Theory of Gravity”
published in Phys. Rev. D 94, 124035 (2016), arXiv:1606.01887.
Dr. Khosravi’s work was recognised by the judging panel as “a novel proposal that suggests new ways to approach outstanding problems in gravitational physics, weighting the contribution of different self-consistent theories of gravity to show that different theories may prevail in different environments in the Universe.”
The novel idea is that all theoretically consistent models of gravity have weighted contributions to the observed gravity interaction. Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR) has maximal weight compared to other theories in high-curvature regions of the universe. For low-curvature regions, Dr. Khosravi pointed out that the weaker gravitational force there can be interpreted as the existence of a repulsive fifth force with higher weights for very large scales compared to GR.
The winners of the 2016 Buchalter Cosmology Prize were announced on 5th January, 2017 at the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas. The annual prize, created by Dr. Ari Buchalter in 2014, seeks to reward new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe.
