Climate change, potential new power sources, plug-in hybrid cars, nuclear terrorism, and planets orbiting our sun and others will be among the topics explored by visiting speakers in the fall "What Physicists Do" public lecture series at Sonoma State University.
Lectures will be on Mondays at 4 p.m. from Sept. 11 through Nov. 27 in SSU's newly-remodeled Darwin 103. Coffee, cookies, and conversation are available beginning at 3:30 p.m.
The series will begin Sept. 11 with Simon Labov of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory speaking on an appropriate topic for the fifth anniversary of the attack on the United States: "Making the World Safer: Nuclear Terrorism and What Physicists Can Do."
The following Monday Philip Duffy will speak on climate change, including discussing both the evidence for it and societal impacts. The director of the Institute for Research on Climate Change and Its Societal Impacts at the Livermore Lab, Duffy is also affiliated with the University of California, Merced.
One possible response to global warming is to switch to nuclear power. This option will be explored on Sept. 25 by Jasmina Vujic, the chair of the nuclear engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Another response, which could use nuclear or other sources to provide the energy, is to make use of hydrogen in vehicles, buildings, and power plans. This will be the topic of University of California, Davis professor Joan Ogden on Oct. 30.
Her colleague in mechanical engineering at UCD, Andrew Frank, will speak on plug-in hybrid cars on Oct. 9. Frank is considered the leading authority on this topic.
"The Limits of Magnetic Recording" will be discussed on Oct. 2, when Mason Williams presents a Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecture. Williams is retired after an illustrious career at IBM and Hitachi.
Christine Orme of the Lawrence Livermore Lab will speak on "Biomineralization-Nature's Way of Crystallizing" on Oct. 16.
There will be two talks on planets: Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University, a member of the team that has discovered more than half the known planets orbiting other suns, will describe the search for earthlike planets on Oct. 23.
Kevin Baines of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make the trip from Pasadena to speak on new views of Venus and Saturn on Nov. 6.
Renowned scientists who have recently written popular books on the universe will give two talks in November. Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Nancy Abrams are the authors of "The View from the Center of the Universe." They will speak on Nov. 13.
Stanford University's Leonard Susskind, sometimes called the father of string theory, will speak on his book, "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," on Nov. 27.
Berkeley physics professor Michael Crommie will describe exploring and manipulating nanostructures at the single-molecule level on Nov. 20.
For a free poster describing all twelve lectures, visit http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/ or send e-mail to phys.astro@sonoma.edu or phone (707) 664-2119.
