Colloquia

Abstract: The Internet was designed in 1973, began operation in 1983, became widely known to the general public in 1993 and now has become a global infrastructure for all forms of communication. The network is relatively unaware of the applications that use it and also relatively insensitive to the technologies that transport its Internet "packets" around the world. Where did the Internet come from? What is its condition today? How will it be used tomorrow? What might we expect it to look like in the next decade? What technical and international policy challenges does the Internet pose? Could it be made to operate across our solar system to support manned and robotic exploration? Answers to these questions and more will be provided in this presentation. Short Biography: Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Cerf served as a senior vice president of MCI from 1994-2005, as VP of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives from 1986-1994, as VP MCI from 1982-1986, and as Principal Scientist, US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Techniques Office from 1976-1982. Cerf was a member of the Stanford Faculty from 1972-1976. Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He received the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1997 and the 2004 ACM Alan M. Turing award. In November 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in April 2008 the Japan Prize. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007 and was founding president of the Internet Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum and the National Academy of Engineering. He is an honorary Freeman of the City of London and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Cerf holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA and is the recipient of over a dozen honorary degrees..

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After the fundamental contribution of Cosmic Microwave Background observations to define what is now known as the standard cosmological model, what lies ahead for the field? Ground-based, balloon-borne and space-based experiments will observe the Cosmic Microwave Background in greater details to address open questions about the origin and the evolution of the Universe. In particular, detailed observations the polarization pattern of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation have the potential to directly probe physics at the GUT scale and illuminate aspects of the physics of the very early Universe..

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Human society is arguably the most complex system we know of – populated by entities that can adapt, learn, self-organize and show completely different responses to apparently identical stimuli. One might reasonably wonder whether society exhibits a qualitatively different kind of complexity from that found in inanimate matter. Yet there is a long history of faith in the notion that parallels do exist, and work in recent decades has confirmed that groups of many interacting social agents show collective modes of behaviour analogous to, and sometimes formally equivalent to, those seen in traditional statistical physics, such as phase transitions, phase separation and power-law fluctuations. I will examine this idea, and ask the question whether the physics of complex systems can truly tell us anything about sociology, history, economics and politics..

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The current understanding of climate change in the industrial age is that it is predominantly caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with relatively small natural contributions due to solar irradiance and volcanoes. However, palaeoclimatic reconstructions show that the climate has frequently varied on 100-year time scales during the Holocene (last 10 kyr) by amounts comparable to the present warming - and yet the mechanism or mechanisms are not understood. Some of these reconstructions show clear associations with solar variability, which is recorded in the light radio-isotope archives that measure past variations of cosmic ray intensity. However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established. Estimated changes of solar irradiance on these time scales appear to be too small to account for the climate observations. This raises the question of whether cosmic rays may directly affect the climate, providing an effective indirect solar forcing mechanism. Indeed recent satellite observations - although disputed - suggest that cosmic rays may affect clouds. This talk presents an overview of the palaeoclimatic evidence for solar/cosmic ray forcing of the climate, and reviews the possible physical mechanisms. These will be investigated in the CLOUD experiment which begins to take data at the CERN PS later this year..

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The Fermi observatory is an international, multi-agency satellite mission that was launched by NASA in june 2008 and has since then been exploring the high energy gamma-ray sky from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. This largely unexplored region of the electro-magnetic spectrum is home to emissions from the most energetic and mysterious objects in the cosmos, like black holes, active galactic nuclei, rapidly spinning neutron stars, supernovae remnants and gamma-ray bursters. Leveraging on the high instrument resolution and acceptance, and on an outstanding operation efficiency, the mission team has been able to record a remarkable variety of novel observations, spanning from astronomy to particle astrophysics with exciting implications on fundamental physics. At the same time the collaboration is preparing to deliver photon data and analysis tools to the public starting from the second year of operations, along with improved knowledge of the instrument performance. In this talk I will review some of the most interesting results obtained by Fermi in the field of gamma-ray astrophysics, and discuss the Fermi measurement of the primary cosmic ray electron spectrum between 20 GeV and 1 TeV..

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The Quantum Theory of Fields: Effective or Fundamental?.

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Physical optics has expanded greatly in recent years. Though it remains part of the ancestry of elementary particle physics, there are once again lessons to be learned from it. I shall discuss several of these, including some that have emerged at CERN and Brookhaven..

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Humans may be distinguished from all other animals in having beliefs about the causal interaction of physical objects. Causal beliefs are a developmental primitive in human children; animals, by contrast, have very few causal beliefs. The origin of human causal beliefs comes from the evolutionary advantage it gave in relation to complex tool making and use. Causal beliefs gave rise religion and mystical thinking as our ancestors wanted to know the causes of events that affected their lives..

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Abstract The open source Apache Hadoop project provides a powerful suite of tools for storing and analyzing petabytes of data using commodity hardware. After several years of production use inside of web companies like Yahoo! and Facebook and nearly a year of commercial support and development by Cloudera, the technology is spreading rapidly through other disciplines, from financial services and government to life sciences and high energy physics. The talk will motivate the design of Hadoop and discuss some key implementation details in depth. It will also cover the major subprojects in the Hadoop ecosystem, go over some example applications, highlight best practices for deploying Hadoop in your environment, discuss plans for the future of the technology, and provide pointers to the many resources available for learning more. In addition to providing more information about the Hadoop platform, a major goal of this talk is to begin a dialogue with the ATLAS research team on how the tools commonly used in their environment compare to Hadoop, and how Hadoop could improve better to serve the high energy physics community. Short Biography Jeff Hammerbacher is Vice President of Products and Chief Scientist at Cloudera. Jeff was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to founding Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University and recently served as contributing editor to the book "Beautiful Data", published by O'Reilly in July 2009..

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The last decade or two have represented the golden age of observational cosmology, producing a revolution in our picture of the Universe on its largest scales, and perhaps also its smallest ones. I will argue that these recent development bring to the forefront some vexing questions about whether various fundamental assumptions about the universe are in fact falsifiable. I will focus on 3 issues: (1) "Proving" Inflation, (2) Dark Energy and Anthropic Arguments, and (3) Cosmology of the far future.
Interview with Lawrence M. Krauss.

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The 2007 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes: "Warming in the climate system is unequivocal." Without the contribution of Physics to climate science over many decades, such a statement would not have been possible. Experimental physics enables us to read climate archives such as polar ice cores and so provides the context for the current changes. For example, today the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the second most important greenhouse gas, is 28% higher than any time during the last 800,000 years. Classical fluid mechanics and numerical mathematics are the basis of climate models from which estimates of future climate change are obtained. But major instabilities and surprises in the Earth System are still unknown. These are also to be considered when the climatic consequences of proposals for geo-engineering are estimated. Only Physics will permit us to further improve our understanding in order to provide the foundation for policy decisions facing the global climate change challenge..

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Gravity and quantum theory cause the Universe to be spontaneously created out of nothing. Most of these universes are quite unlike our own but we select out a subset that are compatible with what we observe. Please note that Professor Hawking's talk will be broadcasted in the following rooms : TH auditorium (4-3-006) TE auditorium (30-7-018) 40-S2-A01 40-S2-C01 BE Meyrin (6-2-024) BE Prévessin (864-1-D02).

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