Famed author and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and astrophysicist J. Anthony Tyson head a stellar array of scientists who will present free public lectures in Sonoma State University's "What Physicists Do" series this spring.
Lectures will be on Mondays at 4 p.m., from Feb. 7 through May 8 (excluding Feb. 21 and Apr. 10), in room 108 Darwin Hall on the SSU campus.
Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science, computer science, and two other subjects at Indiana University, won a Pulitzer prize for Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, the first of his five books. An expert on modeling perception and thought, he has also translated Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. He will speak at SSU on "The Ubiquity and Power of Analogies in Physics" on Feb. 14.
Tyson, whose discovery of faint blue galaxies and work with gravitational lensing were featured in the video series, "The Astronomers," works at Lucent Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He will speak on "Cosmic Dark Matter and Optical Communication" April 24.
The series opens Feb. 7 with Rosaly Lopes-Gautier coming from JPL in Pasadena to present the latest on Jupiter's volcano-covered satellite Io, recently explored at close range by the NASA spacecraft Galileo.
Other speakers include the inventor of "electronic paper" at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the UC Santa Cruz geophysicist whose model shows why the earth's magnetic field reverses from time to time.
From Stanford University will come the chair of the physics department, Blas Cabrera, detailing his search for "WIMPs," the weakly interactive massive particles believed by many to be the dark matter that makes up most of the universe, and the dean of earth sciences, Lynn Orr, to demonstrate soap bubbles and their connection with inkjet printers.
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.
For more information:
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/
