| LIPTA FALL 2018 CONFERENCE is now over, BUT you can still get the 'resistor boards'. Sold in groups of 10 for $100, delivered to your school. Send a PO to the address in the box above. OR, you can buy them yourself: Send a personal check to the address in the box above |
Fri 2/21 | PHYSICS LECTURE AT SUNYSB ESS 001; 7:30PM Cyrus Dreyer, “Understanding solids with supercomputers, many electrons at a time” According to visionary American physicist Richard Feynman: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” The properties of the materials that make up the world around us are governed by how these atoms attract and repel each other. For example, whether a solid is hard and translucent like diamond, or soft and opaque like graphite; whether a material conducts electricity and heat like copper, or prevents the flow of electricity and heat like rubber; whether a material can be used in computer chips, like silicon; or whether a drug like aspirin will mitigate a fever. The outer “valence” electrons, i.e., those furthest from the atomic nuclei containing the protons and neutrons, play the most important role in these interatomic interactions, and therefore the properties of the materials made of the atoms. All of our technology is based on our ability to design and engineer materials, and thus it is crucial to be able to understand how the valence electrons in a material interact. This turns out to be a very difficult problem, one that has challenged scientists for a century. For one thing, electrons are small, and thus governed by the weird properties of quantum mechanics. Also, there are a lot of them in a given material: there are more electrons in the atoms that make up a paper clip than there are stars in the universe. In this talk I will describe a particular approach to tackling the “many electron problem,” known as Density Functional Theory, which, combined with the most powerful supercomputers in the world, has revolutionized our ability to describe and predict the properties of materials. I will give a variety of examples of how this knowledge of materials can be used to develop novel electronic devices for modern technology. |
Fri 2/28 | GEOLOGY LECTURE AT SUNYSB ESS 001; 7:30PM, Gregory Henkes, “The environments of human evolution in East Africa” There are a variety of hypotheses for the patterns and processes of human evolution, but virtually all call on changes in the local environment and regional or global climate to perpetuate hominin speciation over the last 4-5 million years. This talk will be part tour through the geologic and paleontological changes in East Africa and part review of the environmental and climatic changes that accompanied them. My research interests are better understanding the chemistry of sedimentary rock archives of environment and climate, thus my focus will also be on how these records are developed and where the state-of-the-art currently lies. |
3 /14/18 | Stephen Hawking dies at age 76 - read some of his QUOTES; his appearances in Star Trek TNG, the Pink Floyd album 'The Division Bell', the Simpsons, the Metropolitan Opera piece, 'The Prologue', the Big Bang Theory and the movie 'The Theory of Everything' are HERE |
