The latest developments in solar system exploration, black holes and nano-science will be among the topics explored by visiting speakers in the fall "What Physicists Do" public lecture series at Sonoma State University.
Lectures are on Mondays at 4 p.m., from Sept. 12 through Nov. 28, in a new location: Room 3001 in the Jean and Charles Schulz Information Center on the SSU campus.
The series begins Sept. 12 with Dr. Kurt Woschnagg of the University of California at Berkeley describing an audacious undertaking to instrument a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to detect cosmic neutrinos.
The first solar system talk will be Sept. 19, when Chris McKay of NASA Ames Research Center will present results from the probe that landed on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, earlier this year.
The other is Nov. 7, when University of Hawaii astronomer Karen Meech describes the results of the probe which she and her colleagues sent into a comet in July.
This being the World Year of Physics in commemoration of Albert Einstein's spectacular achievements of 1905, there will be a talk on Einstein as a pioneer of social responsibility, by Prof. Lawrence Badash of the University of California, Santa Barbara Oct. 24; a presentation by Bruce Clarke of Stanford University on the Gravity Probe B satellite which is currently refining the tests of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity Nov. 28; and a popular lecture on one of the results of that theory, the black hole, by Eliot Quataert of the University of California at Berkeley on Nov. 14.
Prize-winning materials scientist Ramamoorthy Ramesh of the University of California at Berkeley will talk about the exciting field of nanoscale materials and phenomena Sept. 26.
Those interested in applying physics to societal problems will want to attend Oct. 3, when the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Hashem Akbari speaks on Cooling the Cities to Reduce Energy Use and Improve Urban Air Quality, and Nov. 21, when Susanne Hering of Aerosol Dynamics Inc. tells how she detects nanoparticles in the Earth's atmosphere.
Other lectures will deal with another Einstein effect, gravitational lensing, and with superfluids.
For a free poster describing all twelve lectures, see http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/, send e-mail to gayle.walker@sonoma.edu, or call (707) 664-2119.
