David Wiltshire

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand. Phone: (+64 3) 364 2473 Fax: (+64 3) 364 2469 Email: David.Wiltshire AT canterbury.ac.nz
My research interests are in general relativity, cosmology and quantum gravity. I am President of the Australasian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation.

Amongst the permanent faculty in theoretical physics my research interests most closely intersect with those of Jenni Adams; and Dharamvir Ahluwalia.

I currently have a research project, Gravitational energy and cosmic structure: What is the Universe made of?, from the Marsden fund administered by the RSNZ. Teppo Mattsson joined us in September 2009 as a postdoc on this project, and his wife Maria Mattsson is a visiting research associate, also working on inhomogeneous cosmology. Ishwaree Neupane has been with us as a research fellow since June 2004, and works in other areas of gravitational physics and cosmology. I am supervisor to one PhD student, Peter Smale. Emeritus Professor Roy Kerr maintains an active association with our group. We have on-going interactions with Matt Visser's group at Victoria University of Wellington.

Gravitational energy as dark energy

	Recent papers: Average observational quantities in the timescape cosmology: Phys. Rev. D 80 (2009) 123512; Cosmological equivalence principle and the weak-field limit: Physical Review D 78 (2008) 084032; Physical Review Letters 99 (2007) 251101; and Astrophysical Journal 672 (2008) L91. Dark energy without dark energy, arxiv:0712.3984 (Overview for Dark2007 Proceedings)

Cosmic Clocks, Cosmic Variance and Cosmic Averages, New J. Phys. 9 (2007) 377, Focus on Dark Energy

The Kerr Spacetime: Rotating Black Holes in General Relativity (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Kerr Fest - In August, 2004, I organised a Symposium on black holes in astrophysics, general relativity and quantum gravity, in celebration of Professor Roy Kerr's 70th birthday. More recently, in December 2009, I organised ACGRG5.

• Career biography

• Publications (or SPIRES list of papers)

• Past research students

• Official departmental home page

• Other thoughts about science:

  • Dead of Night in Are Angels OK? eds P. Callaghan and B. Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2006). A short story by Witi Ihimaera which I helped coauthor ... a poetic description of the Big Crunch and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation make it into science fiction for the first time.

  • How PBRF averages penalise departments with research grant success
    (abridged version in New Zealand Education Review, 19 May 2004; updated 30 May 2007).

  • A debate about the limits, future and threats to science:
    • Puzzles of the sciences endure (The Australian, 4 September 1996)
    • End of science? (Ockham's Razor, ABC Radio, 30 August 1998)
    • John Horgan off the Edge: a dialogue

  • The brain drain:
    Along with other colleagues I left academe in Australia when the Howard Government funding cuts impacted severely on university physics and mathematics departments. These links date from that time:
    • Educating the Minister of Science about Australia's brain drain (the Australian, 3 December 1999)
    • The crisis at ECU (November, 1998)
    • Jim McCarthy's resignation letter (16 July, 1998)