New Project

So, these days I'm working on Ashtetekar's Isolated/dynamic Horizon formalism. I don't have a lot of the details worked out yet, but I'm getting increasingly excited about studying these things--they remove a lot of the confusing nonsense that I've struggled through during my time in gradschool. The great features of this include 1) there is no reference to the gloabal structure of the spacetime in defining these isolated/dynamic horizons; 2) They enable a convenient LOCAL definition of the mass and angular momentum contained within a black hole 3) they provide a natural set of boundary conditions which can be used to provide a natural way of excising the interior of a black hole from a spacetime 4) The condition that Hamiltonian evolution of a spacetime is consistent on the horizon, post-excision is the first law of black hole dynamics, now conveniently defined in terms of quantities defined on the horizon. 5) Not only can you prove the area increase law using this formalism, you can actually calculate how much the area will increase when matter/radiation falls into the hole. I need to do some reading to fully understand the details, but I'm excited nonetheless. And that explains the sporadic posting