Compton Lecture series on ‘Physics of Stuff’ to be held from April 3 to June 12

A series of 10 free lectures at the University of Chicago will describe the fascinating and exotic properties of everyday matter, and the universal framework that physicists use to think about large complex systems.

"The Physics of Stuff: Why matter is more than the sum of its parts" is the title of this spring's Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored biannually by the University's Enrico Fermi Institute. The 71th series of these free public lectures will begin Saturday, April 3 and will be held each Saturday through June 12 (except for May 29, Memorial Day weekend). The lectures will be given from 11 a.m. to noon in Room 106 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave.

Compton Lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the physical sciences. Delivering the lectures this spring will be Justin Burton, who received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of California, Irvine. Burton came to UChicago's James Franck Institute in 2009, following a year of postdoctoral research on the evolution of cooperation at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

In his Compton Lectures, Burton will review some of the basic ideas underlying condensed-matter physics (the physics of solids and liquids) and the ways in which scientists use this knowledge to understand complex systems, from sand piles and glasses to liquid crystals and genetic circuits.

The Compton Lectures are named for Arthur Holly Compton, a former physicist at the University who is best known for demonstrating that light has the characteristics of both a wave and a particle

Compton also organized the effort to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb and directed the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, where Fermi and his colleagues produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942.

For more information about the lecture series, call (773) 702-7823, or see http://home.uchicago.edu/~jcburton/comptonlectures.html.

The Compton Lecture series schedule:

April 3: The matter we know: from the ordinary to the exotic

April 10: Solids: crystals and symmetry

April 17: Fluids and interfacial physics

April 24: Phase transitions: a universal theme

May 1: Super-stuff: quantum matter

May 8: Disorder and glassiness

May 15: From the old to the new: soft matter I

May 22: From the old to the new: soft matter II

June 5: Let's put it to use: materials science past and present

June 12: Much more than the sum of its parts: living matter and evolution (followed by luncheon)