Public Lecture Series

Gravitational waves are "ripples of space-time" that were predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity almost a century ago.  The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) now pushes the frontiers of science and engineering to try and catch these waves for the first time.  This will allow us to explore the last dance of pairs of neutron stars colliding to give birth to a black hole and other astrophysical events in a way humans never have before.  Dr. Gonzalez will describe how a worldwide community of scientists is working to open a new window to the Universe searching for Einstein's gravitational waves.

A quasicrystal is an exotic state of matter with symmetries once thought to be impossible for matter. The concept was first introduced and the first examples were synthesized in the laboratory thirty years ago, but could Nature have beaten us to the punch? This talk will describe the search for the first natural quasicrystal, An adventure to the ends of the Earth and beyond and one of the wildest scientific stories you are ever likely to hear.

What is time?  Is our perception of time passing an illusion which hides a deeper, timeless reality?  Or is it real, indeed, the most real aspect of our experience of the world?  Einstein said that "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,"  and many contemporary theorists agree that time emerges from a more fundamental timeless quantum universe. But, in recent cosmological speculation, this timeless picture of nature seems to have reached a dead end, populated by infinite numbers of imagined unobservable universes.  

In his talk, Lee Smolin explains why he changed his mind about the nature of time. Like many fellow theorists, he used to believe time is an illusion, but he now embraces the view that time is real and everything else, including the laws of nature, evolves.  Drawing from his new book, Time Reborn, Smolin explains how the great unsolved problems in physics and cosmology may be solved by adopting the view of a real time.  then he will go beyond physics to explain how our view of time affects how we think of everything from our personal and family lives to how we face major problems such as climate change and economic crisis.  In a world in which time is real, the future is open and there is an essential role for human agency and imagination in envisioning and shaping a good future.

Based on her book, The Calculus Diaries, join, Jennifer Ouellette as she shows how calculus can be applied to everything from gas mileage, diet, the rides at Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, shooting craps in Vegas and warding off zombies.  Even the mathematically challenged, can-and-should learn the fundamentals of the universal language.

While quantum mechanics is an immensely powerful and precise theory which seems to describe everything in the world, its insistence on only predicting what happens when we make "measurements" has left scientists and philosophers alike puzzled - as David Mermin summarized one of Einstein's concerns, "Is the moon there when nobody looks?" Dr. Steinberg will talk about some of the new ideas revolutionizing our view of quantum measurement, in particular the surprising advantages of measuring things "weakly" and suggest that new hints may be emerging about how we should think about Einstein's moon.