Week of events to include physics slam, public lecture on gravitational waves
Scientists from around the world will present results during the International Conference on High Energy Physics. Copyright: CERN
That will be merely one highlight in a program that covers 16 topics—from the Higgs boson to neutrinos to dark matter to cosmology, and will include new results from many experiments at institutions around the world.
“The International Conference on High Energy Physics will be the scientific event of the year in Chicago,” said Young-Kee Kim, chair of the conference’s organizing committee and the Louis Block Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. “A great many scientists who specialize in particle physics, cosmology, accelerator science and related fields work in this region’s excellent research universities and our two outstanding national laboratories. We all look forward to showing this vibrant city to our colleagues and discussing the latest developments of our science.”
Public events
The conference includes two free events specially designed for the public: The Windy City Physics Slam and a public lecture on the recent, headline-making detection of gravitational waves.
The Windy City Physics Slam, hosted by WGN-TV Chief Meteorologist Tom Skilling, will take place at 3 p.m. Aug. 7 at the Sheraton Grand Hotel Chicago Ballroom. Inspired by poetry slams, the Physics Slam will pit researchers against each other in a contest to make their field of study sound as interesting, compelling and enjoyable as possible. Five scientists from around the world will compete, using music, dance, props and anything else they want, with the winner determined by audience applause.
The LIGO collaboration announced in 2015 that they detected the gravitational waves created when two black holes merged. Illustration by: LIGO Collaboration
The public lecture, titled “The Detection of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Hole Mergers,” will begin at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 9, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel Chicago Ballroom. The speaker will be Barry Barish, the Linde Professor of Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. Barish has played multiple key roles for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory since 1994. LIGO made international headlines twice this year with its discoveries of gravitational waves, whose existence were predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1915 general theory of relativity.
Those events are free and open to the public, with seating on a first-come basis.
Source: http://uchicago.edu