2008 Abigail and John Van Vleck Lectures
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David Gross
Noble Laureate
Director of Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
University of California at Santa Barbara
Public Lecture
The Coming Revolutions in Fundamental Physics
4:00 p.m., Wednesday, Wednesday, March 5th
Tate Laboratory of Physics, Room 150, Van Vleck Auditorium
Abstract:review the present state of knowledge in elementary particle physics and the questions that we are currently addressing. I discuss the experimental revolutions that might occur at the Large Hadron Collider, soon to be finished at CERN. I shall also review the state of string theory. The necessity to go beyond the standard model of particle physics and to understand quantum gravity has led to this ambitious attempt to unify all the forces of nature and all forms of matter as different vibrations of a string-like object. But string theory is still in a pre-revolutionary stage.Although remarkable progress has been achieved in the last decade in understanding the perturbative and non-perturbative structure of string theory, we still lack a fundamental understanding of the theory. Many string theorists suspect that a profound conceptual change in our concept of space and time will be required for the final formulation of string theory.
Reception to follow lecture in Physics 216
Colloquium:
The Future of Physics
4:00 p.m., Thursday, March 6, 2008
Tate Laboratory of Physics, Room 131 Tate Lab
Abstract: In this talk I discuss 25 questions that might guide physics, in the broadest sense, over the next 25 years.
Related Links
Biography of David Gross