Category Archives: public lectures

Public Lecture: LHC the Big Bang Machine

Albert De Roeck will give a public lecture entitled
“The Large Hadron Collider: The Big Bang Machine” on Thur. Mar. 27 at 8 pm in the UC Davis Welcome Center Presentation Room. Tickets will be $7 (free for students).

Albert De Roeck

Albert De Roeck

Prof. Dr. Albert De Roeck is a senior research scientist and staff member of the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, CERN, located near Geneva, Switzerland. De Roeck is also a professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and a visiting professor at the Institute of Particle Physics and Phenomenology in Durham (UK) , University of California Davis, and the British University in Cairo (Egypt).

more info
 

Nobel Prize winner Gerardus `t Hooft will give a special lecture on “The Higgs Particle.”

 

Prof. Gerardus `t Hooft

The talk will be held on Thursday Sept. 5, 2013 at 7:30 pm in the UC Davis Medical Education Building at 4610 X Street in Sacramento.

Professor `t Hooft desribes the talk as follows:

Our theoretical understanding of the sub-atomic world would not be complete without the Higgs particle. Sometimes called “The God Particle”, this very special particle generates the differences between the fundamental particles and it gives them mass, but until recently it went undetected. Of course, in science we use different words. In this lecture it is explained what this mysterious object really is and why it is needed in our theories, even if it has little to do with God. Using the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, physicists for the first time have the tools to produce and observe this particle in detail. Is it as it was predicted? Are there whole families of Higgs particles? The LHC has not yet reached its full power. Will it provide us with more clues or mysteries about the sub-atomic world?

more info

Sean Carroll: “The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time

Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll will give a lecture on “The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time” on Wed., May 22 7:30 pm, at the UC Davis Conference Center.

One of the most obvious facts about the universe is that the past is different from the future. We can remember yesterday, but not tomorrow; we can turn an egg into an omelet, but can’t turn an omelet into an egg. That’s the arrow of time, which is consistent throughout the observable universe. The arrow can be explained by assuming that the very early universe was extremely orderly, and disorder has been increasing ever since. But why did the universe start out so orderly? I will talk about the nature of time, the origin of entropy, and how what happened before the Big Bang may be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today. Advance tickets available.