WFU Physics Public Talk

TITLE: New physics all around us!

SPEAKER: Professor Beate Schmittmann ,

TIME: Wednesday March 30, 2011 at 7:30 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

At the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in Switzerland, at the cost of billions of dollars, particle physicists from all over the world look for "new physics", such as the Higgs boson (or "God Particle") and miniature black holes. In this talk, I will argue that exciting and surprising "new physics" can actually be discovered in very familiar phenomena such as the flocking of birds, the formation of traffic jams, or the flow of sand. It can even be found in your kitchen sink! All of these phenomena arise not from the presence of new particles, but from the interactions of many constituent components; understanding the resulting patterns and behaviors forms part of a new science of "emergence".

Professor Schmittmann will also give a physics colloquium at 4:00 PM in Olin 101 -- Totally out of equilibrium: genes, stocks, and traffic -- New questions in statistical physics