Gheorghe Curelet-Balan Blog

Saturday, October 17, 2009

What keeps physicists up at night?

Q2C festival (www.q2cfestival.com ) opening event aligned a panel of physicists that were asked by the moderator
Wilson Da Silva (http://www.twitter.com/wilsondasilva) what keeps them up at night?

Sean M. Caroll wonders what is this universe we are living in and why its laws are the way they are?

Katherine Freese, a Dark Matter expert, is questioning of what our universe is made of? What is the Dark Matter? She's excited that in few days a paper with experimental data about this will be published.

Leo Kadanoff tries to see how physics complexity can be used to understand other complexities like financial markets or living things. .

Laurence Krauss is wondering if we are at the limits of empirical science as result of the tremendous progress that physics made in the last. 30 years. One universe is not enough to answer our questions.

Gino Segre considers that we should think crazy and wild ideas following the examples of Einstein and other great minds that had their greatest discoveries at ages between 23 and 25. He thinks at night at: "what is the craziest thing I can think off so I can sleep at night".

David Tong used to think off how will he ever know if the string theory is valid? To his surprise he learned that the theory can be used as a tool for other unexpected purposes. This fact makes him sleep at night.

You could watch the lecture on this link (http://www.q2cfestival.com/play.php?lecture_id=7976

To be continued...

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Before Q2C's Big Bang!

These are the last moments of calm before the big Q2C (www.q2cfestival.com ) storm that will make Waterloo and Canada (for the next 10 days) the center stage of ideas, debates and thought about the status and future of physics, science and humanity.

Besides the on site activities the festival will be featured online and on TV (www.tvo.org/theagenda/).

From the organizers presentation of the festival:
"The ‘Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future’ Festival marks the 10th Anniversary of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.   The innovative online activities, from October 15th to 25th, will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe."

Physics today and for the last decades (while facing numerous puzzles) is looking for answers of a unique theory that can describe both the micro and macro cosmos. It will be interesting to learn first hand what is Physics current status and what are the possible predictions.

I'm proud and excited to be able to attend tomorrow the Q2C's opening event (www.q2cfestival.com/schedule)
and other lectures and events that I was lucky to get tickets!

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