ROHNERT PARK - Scientists from as near as Santa Rosa and as far away as Chile will present free public lectures in Sonoma State University's renowned "What Physicists Do" series this spring.
Lectures will be on Mondays at 4 p.m., from Feb 5 through May 14 (excluding Feb 19 and Apr 9), in room 108 Darwin Hall on the SSU campus.
The series will open Feb 5 with physicist Melora Larson coming from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena to describe experiments she is about to perform in the Low Temperature Microgravity Facility on the International Space Station.
It will conclude May 14 with astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile presenting the latest results of an international search for the fate of the universe. Dr. Suntzeff and his colleagues have recently discovered that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, contrary to what cosmologists had long thought.
In between will be lectures on scanning tunneling microscopy, renewable energy, fighting counterfeiting with optics, glacier flow, how matter differs from antimatter, air pollution, planets in other solar systems, molecular quantum computing, orbits in quantum mechanics, quantum dot electronics, and stardust.
Three graduates of SSU's department of physics and astronomy are among the speakers: air pollution expert Siana Hurwitt Alcorn of Sonoma Technology, Inc.; glaciologist Jeffrey Kavanaugh of UC Berkeley, and materials scientist Valerie Leppert of UC Davis.
For a free poster describing all twelve lectures, see http://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/, send e-mail to gayle.walker@sonoma.edu, or call (707) 664-2119.
SSU
For more information:
http://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd
