Stop That Light! It took my photon!
On Monday evening, 11 Augie students, 2 faculty, and an alum went to see a public lecture on stopping light by Ronald Walsworth at Western Illinois University. I think there were almost as many Augie students there as WIU students! Augie rocks! (Nothing like extra credit as a motivational tool).
The talk was wonderful! There was a ton of reinforcement of basic quantum principles for my modern physics students, plenty of novel and exciting physics for the physicists, and jokes and pop culture references for all! Poor William Shatner.
After the talk, I raised my hand to ask a question, but a few others were called on first -- all of whom happened to be physicists with technical questions. Just as Walsworth was about to call on me to ask my question, the moderator said, "This is a public lecture, not a technical one, let's take some questions from non-physicists." I dutifully put my hand down just as I was about to be called on, and Walsworth said, "Oh, are you a physicist?" So I didn't get to ask my question, but on the bright side, at least I don't look like a physicist!
:-D
I wish I could have gone to Walsworth's technical talk on Tuesday, but I had class. Tom, if you went, can you fill us in?
One more great thing about Walsworth's talk: he never once claimed that the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics required multiple universes!
That was the subject I meant to rant about after Sean Carroll's talk (see this earlier post). Just because there are 10500 different ways that the alleged extra dimensions can curl up to be undetectable by us, does not mean that there are 10500 different universes, each instantiating a different possibility.
Not that Carroll's talk was bad. Overall I enjoyed it. Besides "Sean Carroll" seems to be a popular search term, so this blog has gotten a bunch of hits because of him. Now we just need a Sean Carroll video!
1 comment:
I took extensive notes at the technical talk right up until the point where I no longer understood a word he was saying and the powerpoint slides were going too quickly for me to copy them down. He talked primarily about masers and their practical uses (including the maser in the probe that's testing General Relativity).
He also discussed how the leading theories trying to unify GR and QM (Strings, Loop Quantum Gravity, Quintessence) all allow violations of Lorentz symmetry. Apparently, under those models, there is spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking at certain orders of magnitude.
The really neat part of the talk was his discussion of hyperpolarization, which allowed the construction of new MRI-type devices, which were portable, used a field of much smaller intensity, and allowed scanning while patients were standing or moving around. They saw this as a major medical breakthrough, and were first able to do a scan of functioning lungs in an upright position, confirming a theory about pulmonary capillaries that had long been medically accepted, but never seen in action.
So, it was neat stuff. I just wish he hadn't gone through it quite so quickly.
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