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MIT Physics Lecture Series:f A 9 Billion Dollar Venture to Shake Up the Laws of Nature
Professor Iain Stewart
Fri Jan 27, 01:30pm-02:30am, 6-120
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
Physics as we know it can be described at a fundamental level by four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force of radioactive decays, and the strong force that binds quarks into a proton. They drive an enormously rich variety of interesting physical phenomena, whose study populates the subfields of physics in our department. An interesting question is whether nature stopped at just four. Indeed the standard model of particle physics hypothesizes a fifth "force" caused by Higgs bosons, and a main purpose of the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN is to shake up the known laws of nature by discovering new forces. In this lecture I will describe how we make predictions for what the experiment will see based on known physics, which are crucial input to finding new forces. I'll explain why a fundamental tool is careful and imaginative organization of Taylor series, as well as why these series are somewhat trickier than the ones you've met so far in 8.0X.
Contact: Denise Wahkor, 4-315, 253-4855, denisew@mit.edu
Sponsor: Physics
Latest update: 09-Dec-2011
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