Lecturer: Dr. Hans Christian Von Baeyer Topic: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Schödinger's Cat Location: OLSSON 120, The College of William and Mary, Virginia When: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 More Info: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/colloquia/event603.html
Abstract: The meaning of quantum mechanics, the description of light and atoms, has been controversial since its invention in 1925. Throughout my career I have lived with the nagging worry that the theory, in spite of all its spectacular successes in practice, doesn't really make sense. The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously grumbled: "Nobody understands quantum mechanics!" But now, at the dawning of the information age, the new technologies of quantum computing and quantum cryptography are inspiring a new optimism that we will be able to resolve the fundamental paradoxes of quantum mechanics by re-examining the relationship between information and probability. I hope that Feynman's remark will soon be history! Dr. Baeyer's Biography: In the course of his career he has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, served as Director of the Virginia Associated Research Campus--an interdisciplinary research laboratory which became the nucleus of the Jefferson Lab (the world's premier electron accelerator facility for nuclear physics)--and garnered numerous awards for his scientific writing. His other books include "Taming the Atom", "Rainbows, Snowflakes and Quarks", and "Warmth Disperses and Time Passes". (from Harvard University Press) _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
