Events on Friday, February 21st, 2020
- PGSC Professional Development Seminar
- How to Get the Most out of Academic Articles
- Time: 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Alex Pizzuto, Physics Graduate Student
- Abstract: Getting all the information out of a dense academic article is a challenge no matter what point you’re at in your physics career. Even if you’re reading a paper very close to your field, language, figures, and presentation style can act as barriers to understanding the take-home message of the work. I’ll cover strategies for approaching articles geared towards overcoming these barriers. You’ll improve your research efficiency by being able to interpret the motivations, methods, results, and implications of an article after a 5-minute read.
- Host: Rob Morgan, graduate student
- Physics Department Colloquium
- It's all About Matter
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Young-Kee Kim , U Chicago
- Abstract: Subatomic-particle research has made enormous progress in the 20th Century by looking inside matter at deeper and deeper levels. It is as if we were peeling the layers of an onion in the hopes of finding more basic rules for the structure of nature. Although the concept of the ultimate building blocks of matter has been modified in several essential respects in the last century, Democritus’s idea remains at the foundation of modern science. Great experiments of the 20th century have led to the discovery of ever-smaller entities that make up what were once thought to be indivisible particles. Moreover, the theory of the very small has been shown to be intimately connected to the largest scales imaginable – cosmology and the beginnings of the Universe. Despite these considerable successes, the current theory has within it the seeds of its own demise and is predicted to break down when probed at even smaller scales. One of such examples is the origin of mass of fundamental particles. We have achieved a beautiful and profound understanding of how fundamental particles acquire their mass, but the mass values remain deeply mysterious. In addition, we learned that ordinary matter supplies only a small fraction of mass in the Universe. We continue to peel away at the more hidden layers of truth with the hope of discovering a more elegant and complete theory. But as is the case with the onion, we must wonder whether there will ever emerge an ultimate layer where the peeling must stop.
- Host: Tulika Bose