Background Paper: How Should We Classify Civil Society?: A Review of Mainstream and Alternative Approaches

This brief analysis reviews mainstream classification schemes before introducing a proposal for classifying civil society actors by their orientation within political theories of civil society

Remarks on the McKay Conjecture

The McKay Conjecture (MC) asserts the existence of a bijection between the (inequivalent) complex irreducible representations of degree coprime to $p$ ($p$ a prime) of a finite group $G$ and those of the subgroup $N$, the normalizer of Sylow $p$-subgroup. In this paper we observe that MC implies the existence of analogous bijections involving various pairs of algebras, including certain crossed products, and that MC is \emph{equivalent} to the analogous statement for (twisted) quantum doubles. Using standard conjectures in orbifold conformal field theory, MC is \emph{equivalent} to parallel statements about holomorphic orbifolds $V^G, V^N$. There is a uniform formulation of MC covering these different situations which involves quantum dimensions of objects in pairs of ribbon fusion categories

Bulk supertranslation memories: a concept reshaping the vacua and black holes of general relativity

The memory effect is a prediction of general relativity on the same footing as the existence of gravitational waves. The memory effect is understood at future null infinity as a transition induced by null radiation from a Poincar\'e vacuum to another vacuum. Those are related by a supertranslation, which is a fundamental symmetry of asymptotically flat spacetimes. In this essay, I argue that finite supertranslation diffeomorphisms should be extended into the bulk spacetime consistently with canonical charge conservation. It then leads to fascinating geometrical features of gravitational Poincar\'e vacua. I then argue that in the process of black hole merger or gravitational collapse, dramatic but computable memory effects occur. They lead to a final stationary metric which qualitatively deviates from the Schwarzschild metric.Comment: 5 pages + bibliography. Honorable mention at the Gravity Research Foundation 2016 Essay Contes