Gheorghe Curelet-Balan Blog

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

A Smiling Nobel Scientist.

It was on June 6, 2006 when I've enjoyed a delightful profound and intriguing lecture presented by a scientist that was approaching some of nature's deepest secrets with smiles. I've learned then about the passions of the Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek, a Perimeter Institute friend. Some of his passions expressed as: mass without mass, massless building blocks or the music of the void wouldn't make sense without explanations. The simplicity of explanations that followed showed that our visible reality at its deep structure is like a fluctuating lava lamp where something comes out of nothing.

Watching the lecture recently I enjoyed again the comments about the power of mathematics and how physicists think and get excited when there are ways to prove their theories.

After talking about the origins of the ordinary matter (that is only 5% of Universe's matter), feebleness of gravity and LHC promises the audience was treated with the fast motion video presentation of a Nobel Prize banquet (starting at minute 76 of PI video stream).

Here it is for you to enjoy: A Night with Nobel - The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity PI lecture.

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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

On the Vital Signs cover.

The Waterloo Region's second Vital Signs report is out. I'm proud to be able to contribute in taking the vital signs pulse of the Region through the lenses of my cameras.

From my perspective I've seen in the last year more vital signs than in the previous one. There were so many festival/events (many new ones) that I had trouble keeping up with.

I'm also lucky that for the second time I'm a winner in the Vital Signs photo contest. One of my pictures "High Flying Objects" won the third prize. You can see it in the top right corner of the cover of Waterloo Region's Vital Signs 2008 brochure [PDF].

The photo was taken during Canada Day 141th anniversary celebrations from the University of Waterloo's (UW) Columbia Lake Fields having in the background the Accelerator Centre building in the Research and Technology Park.

As last year the local newspaper The Record covered the event and published an advertising issue with the photos in the October 7th issue.

I also took a video clip of the high flying objects in motion and embedded it in the below Canada Day video montage.

Vital Signs, such a great initiative to take the community's pulse!

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