A series of 10 free lectures at the University of Chicago will explore the bewildering number and variety of energy transformations that make everyday conveniences possible. These are easy to take for granted but are rooted in the last century and a half of developments in physics.
"The Physics of Energy Devices" is the title of this fall's Arthur Holly Compton Lectures, sponsored biannually by the University's Enrico Fermi Institute. The 70th series of these free public lectures will begin Saturday, Oct. 3 and will be held each Saturday through Dec. 12 (except for Nov. 28). 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 Eric Switzer, a fellow at the University's Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. Switzer received his bachelor's degree in physics from UChicago in 2003, and his doctorate from Princeton University in 2008.
In these lectures, Switzer will review some of the essential physics of energy technologies in approximately chronological order, from outcomes of electrodynamics and thermodynamics to applications of more modern nuclear and condensed-matter physics. The lectures will break several of these technologies down to their basic phenomena, and put those phenomena in the context of the development of physics as a field.
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.
Schedule
F09 Compton Lecture: The Physics of Energy Devices