A series of free lectures at the University of Chicago will describe how the machines that physicists have built to understand matter on the smallest scales over the last century have found additional uses in medical imaging, nuclear non–proliferation, and a variety of other real–world applications.
“Particle Physics: What has it done for you lately?” is the title of this autumn’s Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored biannually by the University’s Enrico Fermi Institute. The 72nd series of these lectures will be held each Saturday through Dec. 11 (except for Nov. 27, Thanksgiving weekend; and Dec. 4, when the annual “Physics With A Bang” holiday lecture and open house will occur). 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 autumn is Joseph Tuggle, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute. Tuggle received his doctoral degree in high–energy particle physics from the University of Maryland in 2009. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration, which conducts research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland.
Each week in his Compton Lectures, Tuggle will focus on a novel, current use of a particle physics technology with an eye toward the principles behind its operation and how it has advanced physics, as well as its tangible societal benefits.
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://efi.uchicago.edu/events/compton_lectures.shtml.
The Compton Lecture series schedule
- Oct. 2: Revealing History (lecture video coming soon to http://hep.uchicago.edu/~jtuggle/compton/)
- Oct. 9: Medical Physics (lecture video coming soon to http://hep.uchicago.edu/~jtuggle/compton/)
- Oct. 16: Seeing Through Walls
- Oct. 23: Green Technology
- Oct. 30: Known Unknowns
- Nov. 6: The Why of the Large Hadron Collider
- Nov. 13: Computing Technology
- Nov. 20: What has the LHC Found so Far?
- Dec. 11: Future Accelerators and Detectors
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
