February 9- February 15, 2003 THE BOSTON AREA PHYSICS CALENDAR The Boston Area Physics Calendar is published weekly during the academic year by the Department of Physics at Boston University. You may send your announcement by e-mail (bapc-events@cosmos.phy.tufts.edu ) or FAX (617-353-9393). We cannot accept announcements by telephone. Entries should reach us no later than 11:00 a.m. the Monday of the week proceeding the week of the event. ENTRIES RECEIVED AFTER THE DEADLINE WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED. Monday, February 9, 2004 Monday, February 9, 2004,1- 5 p.m. Boston University Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science The Castle,225 Bay State Road THE FATE OF INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY CHRISTOPHER SMEENK, University of California at Los Angeles Taking the Measure of the Universe: Probabilities in Cosmology DAVID KAISER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Whose Mass Is it Anyway? Forging the Interface between Particle Physics and Gravitation ALAN GUTH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Inflationary Cosmology and the Accelerating Universe ALEXANDER VILENKIN, Tufts University Eternal Inflation Monday, February 9, 2004 2:00PM Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nuclear and Particle Theory Seminar Center for Theoretical Physics Building 6, Third floor seminar room ``Glueball Regge Trajectories" Harvey Meyers Oxford Refreshments will be served Monday, February 9, 2004 @4:15 p.m. Harvard University Department of Physics Colloquium Jefferson 250 Anomalous Focusing in Elastic Sheets Thomas Witten Chicago University tea will be served in Jefferson 450 at 3:30 pm Monday, February 9, 2004, 4:30 p.m.* Brown University Barus and Holley 168, Professor George Seidel Brown University Title: "TBA" Host: Professor David Cutts *Refreshments served at 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, February 10, 2004 Tuesday, February 10, 2004, 12pm CANCELLED Harvard University Special Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Department of Physics Lyman 425 "Berry phase is magnetic systems" Prof. Qian Niu University of Texas at Austin Tuesday, February 10, 2004, 3:30pm Boston University Physics Department Colloquium "The Physics Case for a Linear Collider" Dr. Sally Dawson Brookhaven National Laboratory Physics Department *Refreshments will be served in the Lounge at 3:10pm Tuesday, February 10, 2004, 4:00pm Brandeis University Martin Weiner Lecture Series, Physics Colloquium Physics Building, Abelson 131 "Playing with Lightening: Tip-Enhanced Fluorescence Microscopy at 10 nm Resolution" Dr. Jordan Gerton CalTech Refreshments in Room 333 at 3:30pm Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2:30 Joint Cosmology Seminar of Harvard/MIT/Tuf Vicky Kalogera (Northwestern University) The Most Relativistic Double Pulsar: Implications for Gravitational-Wave Detection and Neutron-Star Formation The recent discovery of the first double pulsar system PSR J0737-3039 promises to be best laboratory ever found for general relativity and pulsar physics. I will discuss our current expectations for gravitational-wave detection and our current understanding of neutron-star formation in view of this exciting discovery. The seminar will be held in the Gilman room in Agassiz house, Radcliffe Institute (at the corner of Mason and Garden St. 10 min walk from CfA) at 2:30pm. Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Wednesday, 11 February 2004, 2:30 p.m. Brown University Theoretical Seminar: B&H 555 "Ghost Condensation* Wednesday, February 11th, 2004, 4:30 p.m. Joint Theory Seminar Harvard University (Jefferson 356) "A new twist on dS/CFT" David Lowe (Brown U.) Wednesday, February 11, 2004 2:30PM (note new time) Massachusetts Institute of Technology String/Gravity Seminars Center for Theoretical Physics Building 6, Third floor seminar room ``Black holes, time machines and supersymmetry" Harvey Reall KITP, UCSB Refreshments will be served Wednesday, February 11, 2004, 4:00pm University of Massachusetts at Lowell Olney 218 Special Colloquium Jointly Sponsored by the Department of Physics and the Peace and Conflict Studies Institute The Science and Technology of the Bush Administrations Missile Defense Professor Ted A. Postol MIT *refreshments served at 3:30 p.m Wednesday, February 11, 2004, 4:pm Northeastern University Room 114 Dana Research Building "Standard Model and Exotic Physics with Electrons and Muons at the DO Detector" Dr. Daniel Whiteson University of Pennsylvania Special Theory Seminar Wed, Feb 11, 12:30pm Stuart Wyithe (Univ. of Melbourne) The Highest Redshift Quasars and the Reionization of Cosmic Hydrogen In recent years we have seen the first observations of the epoch of reionization. Quasars have been discovered by the SDSS at redshifts as high as z~6.4. Their spectra reveal a universe that is opaque to Ly-alpha photons implying that intergalactic hydrogen was still partially neutral at that time. In addition, the spectra also show giant regions of ionized gas surrounding the quasars. I will describe how the extent of these ionized regions implies a neutral fraction of intergalactic hydrogen that is near unity at z~6.3. While quasar absorption studies suggest that reionization occured near z~6, the WMAP experiment has found a high optical depth to Thomson scattering of CMB photons by free electrons along the line of sight. This implies significant reionization of cosmic hydrogen at redshifts as high as z~20, much earlier than the z~6 implied by the SDSS quasars. I will discuss how an early generation of massive population-III stars could provide a resolution to this dissagreement. Finally I will describe some of the possibilities for redshifted 21cm observations near high redshift quasars with planned instruments like LOFAR. The seminar will be held in Pratt Conference Room (G04) at 12:30pm. Thursday, February 12, 2004, 4:pm Northeastern University Room 114 Dana Research Building "Cortical Circuits, Finite State Automata and Decoding of Spatiotemporal Sequences" Dr. Dezhe Z. Jin Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thursday, February 12, 2004 Thursday, February 12, 2004, 12pm Harvard University The Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Department of Physics Lyman 425 "Spintronics without magnets: basics of spin-optics" Prof. Alexander M. Finkel'stein Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel Thursday, February 12, 2004, 3:00pm Brandeis University Martin Weiner Lecture Series, Physics Colloquium Physics Building, Abelson 131 "Synthetic Genetic Networks" Dr. Stephan Thiberge Princeton University Refreshments in Room 333 at 2:30pm Thursday, February 12, 2004, 4:00 pm Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phillips Auditorium 60 Garden Street, Cambridge " Must Sgr A* be a super-massive black hole?" Mark Reid Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory * tea and cookies at 3:30 p.m. * Thursday, February 12, 2004, 4:15 p.m. Harvard University Duality Seminar Jefferson 453 "Perturbative gauge theory as a string theory in twistor space" Edward Witten IAS Refreshments Thursday, February 12, 2004, 4:15 pm Clark University, Department of Physics, Colloquium Room N-105, Sackler Science Center "A physicist's guide to the landmine/unexploded ordnance problem: Theory and experiment" Peter Weichman ALPHATECH Thursday, February 12th, 2004, 4:15pm The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Physics - Colloquium Series Building 10-250 Deepto Chakrabarty - MIT "Clocking Millisecond X-Ray Pulsars: A Speed Limit for the Fastest Spinning Stars in the Universe" Refreshments - 3:45pm Building 4-339 Friday, February 13, 2004 Friday , February 13, 2004, 4:00pm 209 Pierce Hall, Harvard University Condensed Matter and Applied Physics Colloquium and Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center Lecture "Spin Qubits in GaAs Nanostructures" Prof. Daniel Loss University of Basel February 13, 2004 3:30 p.m. Nelson Auditorium - Anderson Hall Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 Sekazi K. Mtingwa North Carolina A&T State University & Harvard University “An Update on the Linear Collider: Comments on its Status and Thoughts on Novel Uses for the Spent Beams”