Colloquia

George Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize with John Mathere for the discovery of the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. In this talk (which will not be the same as the Nobel lecture), he will discuss what we have learned about the universe in the recent past from these anisotropies..

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MF will talk about his new book The Human Touch, in which he argues that our understanding of the universe is based upon a paradox. On the one hand, we all agree that humankind is a tiny and insignificant local anomaly. On the other hand, it is impossible to have any concept of the universe except through the constructions that human beings have placed upon it. Without human beings there would be no words or language. Would there still be numbers, if there were no one to count them? Or scientific laws, if there were no words or numbers in which to express them? Would the universe even be vast, without the very fact of our smallness and insignificance to give it scale? Could it have any expression in space and time at all, except in relation to our being where we are when we are? Some of these questions are no longer purely abstract, but are becoming of practical interest to cosmologists and physicists. About the speaker: Michael Frayn is the acclaimed author of Copenhagen, the theatre play that describes Heisenberg's visit to the Bohr's during the 2nd World War. He has of course written many other plays and novels, and has won many prestigious prizes. His last book, is a work of non-fiction: 'The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of the Universe'. It will be the main subject of the colloquium. A brief biography of Michael Frayn can be found at: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth114.

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The GLAST mission will open a new era in High Energy Astrophysics. GLAST will increase the available data over its predecessor, EGRET, by 2 orders of magnitude along with greatly improved image reconstruction, dead-time, and energy resolution. Vast improvements to known science and the large discovery potential are eagerly anticipated by the Astrophysics community. The current status of the mission will be detailed as well as the preparation by the GLAST Collaboration for the first observations. A few science topics as relates to fundamental physics questions will also be discussed..

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Marc Fleury, a physicist by training, retired in his thirties after selling the company JBoss, which made an open-source application server, to Red Hat. He will talk about the various business models of open source software. From leveraging available open source software and casual contributions, to on-ramp models and subscription models, various business models have been explored and function. Not all models work for all software fields and business types. He will review those business models in context and survey "state-of-the-art" economic models for open source software production.

Speaker Bio: Marc Fleury is the creator of JBoss, an open-source Java application server.

Fleury holds a degree in mathematics and a Doctorate in physics from the École Polytechnique in Paris and a Master in Theoretical Physics from the École Normale. He worked in France for Sun Microsystems before moving to the United States where he has worked on various Java projects. Fleury's research interest focused on middleware, and he started the JBoss project in 1999, and went on to found the JBoss company with his wife Nathalie. JBoss became a corporation under the name JBoss, Inc. in 2004. After selling his company to Red Hat in 2006, Fleury became Senior Vice President and General Manager of the JBoss Division. On 9 February 2007, his departure from Red Hat was made public. He is currently pursuing other personal interests, such as teaching, research in biology, his family, and doing gigs as a techno DJ in the Atlanta area.

Organiser(s): François Grey / IT department.

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Of the four fundamental forces, gravity has been studied the longest, yet gravitational physics is one of the most rapidly developing areas of science today. This talk will give a broad brush survey of the past achievements and future prospects of general relativistic gravitational physics. Gravity is a two frontier science being important on both the very largest and smallest length scales considered in contemporary physics. Recent advances and future prospects will be surveyed in precision tests of general relativity, gravitational waves, black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. The aim will be an overview of a subject that is becoming increasingly integrated with experiment and other branches of physics..

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Several attractive theoretical ideas suggest the existence of one or more 'hidden sectors' consisting of standard model singlet fields, some of which may not be too heavy. There is a profound reason to think that the Higgs sector might provide the first access to these hidden sectors. This scenario could affect Higgs phenomenology in drastic ways..

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A review of the status of the most crucial issues in particle physics at the start of the LHC is presented. The main questions are related to electroweak symmetry breaking and the mystery of new physics at the TeV scale, that is reasonably expected to be nearby and yet must be very peculiar because it was not seen at LEP and in flavour physics experiments. The main current ideas on models will be discussed and their implications for LHC searches, dark matter etc..

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In December I flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery to ISS, the International Space Station. The main objectives were to continue building ISS, deliver consumables, spare parts and experiments and for the exchange of one crew member on ISS. During the 8-day stay at ISS, I participated in three space-walks, but also got the opportunity to perform one experiment, ALTEA, related to radiation in space and light flashes seen by many people in space. I will give a quick personal history, from when I was a Fellow at Cern in 1990 and learned that I could apply to become an ESA astronaut, to when I finally boarded a space craft to launch on Dec. 9th 2006. A 17 minute video will tell the story about the flight itself. The second half of the talk will be about research related to radiation in space that I have been involved in since joining ESA in 1992. In particular, about light flashes that were first reported on Apollo-11 in 1969, and the SilEye detectors flown on Mir and ISS to investigate fluxes of charged particles inside the space stations and correlations with light flashes. Some results from the DESIRE project, which built a Geant4-based simulation program of ISS and the European Columbus module, will be presented at the end..

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Where does deep insight in physics come from? It is tempting to think that it comes from the purest and most precise of reasoning, following ironclad laws of thought that compel the clear mind completely rigidly. And yet the truth is quite otherwise. One finds, when one looks closely at any major discovery, that the greatest of physicists are, in some sense, the most crazily daring and irrational of all physicists. Albert Einstein exemplifies this thesis in spades. In this talk I will describe the key role, throughout Albert Einstein's fabulously creative life, played by wild guesses made by analogy lacking any basis whatsoever in pure reasoning. In particular, in this year of 2007, the centenary of 1907, I will describe how over the course of two years (1905 through 1907) of pondering, Einstein slowly came, via analogy, to understand the full, radical consequences of the equation that he had first discovered and published in 1905, arguably the most famous equation of all time: E = mc2..

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Symmetry and Asymmetry in Electro-weak Interaction : 50 years after the discovery of parity nonconservation.

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The LHC construction is now approaching the end and it is now time to prepare for commissioning with beam. The behavior of a proton storage ring is much different to that of LEP, which profited from strong radiation damping to keep the beam stable. Our last experience with a hadron collider at CERN goes back more than 15 years when the proton-antiproton collider last operated. Ppbar taught us a lot about the machine physics of bunched beam proton storage rings and was essential input for the design of the LHC. After a short presentation of where we stand today with machine installation and hardware commissioning, I will discuss the main machine physics issues that will have to be dealt with in the LHC..

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There is a consensus among the worldwide high energy physics community that a TeV scale linear electron positron collider is the highest priority long term goal for a new facility for the field. This new particle accelerator, together with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, will enable a comprehensive exploration of the TeV energy scale where many of the new phenomena we seek, like supersymmetry or possibly even extra dimensions could reveal themselves. The international community has chosen superconducting RF technology to be the basis of the ILC concept, and a global design effort has been created to guide the R&D and technical design toward construction. In this presentation, I will discuss the science motivation, the technology, recent progress and plans, and personally assess the prospects..

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