UofT Physics: 2016 H.L. Welsh Lectures in Physics
The Department of Physics invites faculty, students and the public to our 41st annual celebration of physics.
The Welsh Lectures in Physics have been held annually since 1975 in honour of H.L. Welsh, a distinguished former faculty member in the Physics Department. They are the major public event in the life of the Department of Physics and are intended to celebrate discoveries in physics and their wider impact. They are intended to be broadly accessible to an audience drawn from across the university, other academic institutions and the interested public.
1:30pm Welcome and opening remarks: Prof. Stephen Julian, Chair, Department of Physics
1:45pm Dr. Andrea Ghez: "The Monster at the Heart of our Galaxy"
Learn about new developments in the study of black holes. Through the capture and analysis of twenty years of high-resolution imaging, Dr. Ghez and her team have moved the case for a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy from a possibility to a certainty. This was made possible with the first measurements of stellar orbits around a galactic nucleus. Further advances in state-of-the-art of high-resolution imaging technology on the world’s largest telescopes have greatly expanded the power of using stellar orbits to study black holes. Recent observations have revealed an environment around the black hole that is quite unexpected (young stars where there should be none; a lack of old stars where there should be many; and a puzzling new class of objects). Continued measurements of the motions of stars have solved many of the puzzles posed by these perplexing populations of stars and unveiled new unexpected observations. Future measurements of stellar orbits at the Galactic Center hold the promise of improving our understanding of gravity through tests of Einstein Theory of General Relativity in an unexplored regime and providing insight into how black holes grow and the role that they play in regulating the growth of their host galaxies.
Andrea Ghez is the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she is the head of UCLA's Galactic Center Group. She earned her B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987 and her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1992. She has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1994. Professor Ghez is a world-leading expert in observational astrophysics. She has used the Keck telescopes to demonstrate the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. This provides a wonderful opportunity to study the fundamental laws of physics in the extreme environment near a black hole and learn what role this black hole has played in the formation and evolution of our galaxy. She has disseminated her work to a wide variety of audiences through more than 100 refereed papers and 200 invited talks, as well features in textbooks, documentaries, and science exhibits. She has received numerous honors and awards including the Crafoord Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Aaronson Award from the University of Arizona, the Sackler Prize from Tel Aviv University, the American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, the American Astronomical Society's Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, a Sloan Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, and several teaching awards.
3:00pm Coffee Break
3:30pm Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed: "The Future of Fundamental Physics"
Fundamental physics started the 20th century with the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics, and much of the second half of the century was devoted to the construction of a theoretical structure unifying these radical ideas. Yet storm clouds are gathering, which point towards a new set of revolutions on the horizon in the 21st century. Space-time is doomed—how can it emerge from more primitive building blocks? And how is our macroscopic universe compatible with violent microscopic quantum fluctuations that seem to make its existence wildly implausible? In this talk Dr. Arkani-Hamed will describe these deep mysteries and outline some of our strategies for making progress on them. He will also discuss the beginning of plans for a giant new particle accelerator with energy seven times higher than the Large Hadron Collider, that will be necessary to make major progress on at least some of these questions in the coming decades.
Nima Arkani-Hamed is a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Director of The Center for Future High Energy Physics (CFHEP) in Beijing, China. He earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1999 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001. He was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University starting in 2001 and joined the faculty at Harvard in 2002. In 2008 he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study. Prof. Arkani-Hamed is one of the leading particle physics phenomenologists of his generation. His research has shown how the extreme weakness of gravity relative to other forces may be explained by the existence of extra dimensions of space, and how the behaviour of particles at relatively low energies is constrained within the context of string theory. He has taken a lead in proposing new physical theories that can be tested at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He has received numerous honors and awards including a Sloan Fellowship; a Packard Fellowship; the Gribov Medal 2003, a Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 2005, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Physics in 2008, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012.
4:30pm Closing remarks: Prof. Dylan Jones, Chair of the Welsh Lectures Committee
Reception with the speakers afterwards.
Who can attend: Everyone
Fee: Free
Reservations: Not required
Organized by: University of Toronto Department of Physics
Location: JJR Macleod Auditorium, Medical Sciences Building, 1 King's College Circle, Toronto