A series of nine free lectures at the University of Chicago will explore how the scientific view of the smallest constituents of ordinary matter and the forces that act upon them has changed dramatically over the past century.
"From Quantum Mechanics to the String" is the title of this spring's Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored each spring and fall by the University's Enrico Fermi Institute. The 69th series of these public lectures will begin Saturday, April 11 and will be held each Saturday through June 13 (except for May 23). 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 Nelia Mann, McCormick Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute.
Dr. Mann received her bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics, with distinction and departmental honors, from Stanford University in 2001. She earned her doctorate in physics, with specialization in string theory, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2006.
Dr. Mann will discuss particle physics in the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with special relativity (governing the unification of space and time) and quantum mechanics (governing the interactions of atoms and subatomic particles). She will then proceed through the development of the standard model of particle physics, which explains in a unified way the interactions of quarks and leptons through the electromagnetic strong and weak forces.
Dr. Mann also will examine modern theoretical concepts such as string theory, which attempts to unify gravity with the other three forces, extra dimensions-which appear in string theory and other possible extensions of the standard model-and holography, which re-examines the strong force from a string-theory perspective. She will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas, and how future experiments might confirm or disprove them.
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 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.
—Prof. Chuan He
