Eric Sembrat's Test Bonanza

In this talk we will revisit the science known at the time that inspired Mary Shelly to write her novel. Hers is one of the best examples of rigorous science fiction writing as she based it on the most up to date scientific theories and experiments of her era. We will talk about some of Luigi Galvani’s experiments that inspired Mary Shelly and use several hands on demonstrations to explain them and describe how electricity is the driver of muscle activity. Furthermore we will show how electricity can either lead to death or actual resuscitation, and explain the physics behind it and how it is being applied by physicist and engineers to solve Biological, Physiological and Medical problems. 

Photosynthesis is one of the great-impact inventions of biological evolution.  Indeed, life on Earth is fueled energy-wise mainly by sun light.  Many, so-called photosynthetic, life forms harvest sun light directly, for example, plants, algae and bacteria; other life forms use sun light indirectly, like herbivorous animals.  This lecture tells the story a particular simple, yet amazing photosynthetic apparatus, the chromatophore, found in purple bacteria.

The photosynthetic chromatophore is a spherical shell of 50 nm diameter that exists in hundreds of copies in the bacterial cell and converts sun light into chemical synthesis of an energy-rich molecule, adenosin triphosphate (ATP). Each chromatophore is made of over hundred protein complexes with thousands of light absorbing and electron conducting molecules embedded in them; the complexes are held together by a membrane made of 20,000 lipid molecules. Despite its complexity and heterogeneity the chromatophore can be viewed today through advances in experimental and computational biology at atomic- and electronic-level detail in its entire structure and function. One sees a clockwork of linked, mostly rather elementary processes: light absorption, coherent and incoherent exciton formation, intermolecular electron and proton transfer, charge carrier diffusion, electrostatic steering of protein- mediated electron conduction, molecular motor action driven by proton conduction, and lastly mechanically driven ATP synthesis.

For the first time a major part of a biological cell has been resolved in its entirety at the level of truly basic physics, showcasing how Angstrom- scale processes lead to 100-nm-scale intelligent overall function. In viewing the chromatophore through a beautifully detailed movie one can recognize in an exemplary fashion how evolution engineered an apparatus crucial for solar energy-driven life on Earth, utilizing amazing processes on the small scale by linking them together in a clock-work fashion such that an efficient, robust and adaptive cell-scale function emerges.

The 21st Century has seen an explosion of bio-inspired technology and devices. Perhaps no where has this approach been more transformative than in the field of mobile robotics. Geckos, snakes, and even cockroaches have motivated new sticky, stable, steerable robots. Yet inspiration means more than curiosity. As scientists we must unravel the scientific principles and mechanisms underlying animal performance. By studying the physics of these living systems we can inform a systematic approach to animal-inspired robotics. By doing so, we discover new properties and dynamics of complex systems -- the robots themselves even become experimental platforms to test hypotheses. We can learn the pitfalls of ignoring the evolutionary context that shaped animal locomotion and the power of non-dimensional ratios that scale across biology. In this talk, we will first explore how human technology is taking on more characteristics for which the natural world is a better teacher. We will then use several examples over the past decade of robotics research where animals have served as the inspiration, but where identification of the underlying physics has led to innovation. Finally we will discuss how new bio-physical insights emerged from studying the resulting robots as physical models for the biological systems.

Great voyages of exploration have always been driven in large part by an insatiable curiosity to know what is beyond the furthest horizon you can see. Five hundred years ago, the European exploration of the globe was a central feature of the expanding scientific and artistic explosion we call the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Today, we are once again witnessing an age of exploration and discovery, as we push beyond the shores of Earth, looking deep into the far reaches of space. You and I live in an age where, for the first time in human history, we are discovering and mapping alien worlds.  Some of those worlds are not far from home, huddled around our own Sun but difficult to travel to.  Some of those worlds are far across the Cosmos, spinning around other suns in other parts of the galaxy. For the first time in history, we are seeing and probing these worlds with the same age old questions in mind: Who are we? What is our place in the Cosmos? Are we alone?

In this talk, we'll talk about this new age of discovery in our own Solar System, and how our understanding of the Solar System has changed over the past 40 years, during the first reconnaissance of the Worlds of the Sun. We'll preview the upcoming visit to Pluto, and use that as motivation to explore how the discovery of exoplanets around other stars is shaping our understanding of whether our home around the Sun is commonplace or unique in the catalogue of planetary systems.

The cell can be thought of as an organized collection of molecular machines. As such, many biomolecules can have moving parts, generate, bear and leverage forces, and convert chemical energy to mechanical work and vice versa. In this talk I will use several examples to illustrate how mechanics can regulate biology at the molecular scale.

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Our Milky Way is a beautiful spiral galaxy and has been constantly growing since the beginning of time.  How did the ancestors of the Milky Way form and look in the first billion years of the universe? Before galaxies form, isolated massive stars ignite from primordial gas composed of only hydrogen and helium.  They forever changed the cosmic landscape by heating their surroundings and enriching the universe with the first heavy elements.  These events spark the era of galaxy formation, where dwarf galaxies assemble first and then merge together to form larger and larger galaxies.  Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope are just now uncovering these baby galaxies, and a wealth of information will come from the James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2018.  Supercomputer simulations of galaxy formation are vital to interpret these data and to learn about our cosmic origins.  In my talk, I will present the latest results of supercomputer simulations that reveal the sequence of events that lead to the birth of the first galaxies in the universe.

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I introduce a class of dynamical systems which exhibit motion in their lowest-energy states and thus spontaneously break time-translation symmetry. Their Lagrangians have nonstandard kinetic terms and their Hamiltonians are multivalued functions of momentum, yet they are perfectly consistent and amenable to quantization.  Possible  applications to condensed matter systems and cosmology will be discussed.

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Have you ever wondered why an egg solidifies at high temperature while most pure substances, like water, do not? Or why materials solely made of liquids can exhibit solid-like properties? Or why adding a tiny amount of certain additives to water dramatically changes the way water flows? This talk will touch on some of these aspects. It will start by discussing what soft condensed matter is and why soft materials are indeed soft. It will then briefly discuss viscous flow, to end introducing the significance of phase transformations in manipulating food. The aim of the talk is to inspire you into thinking about the properties and behavior of food, while illustrating the power of physics for rationalizing some of the fascinating diversity exhibited by the materials we eat.

To accept Special Relativity we give up Absolute Time. What do we give up to accept Quantum Theory?  After all these years Heisenberg's 1925 discovery paper for Quantum Theory is still opaque, in contrast to  Einstein's for Special Relativity. In hindsight, to accept Quantum Theory we must give up the Classical Principle, which is hardly ever even stated, for the Quantum Principle.  Today this is naturally inferred from a well-known polarization study of Malus in 1805.  Problems  like "spooky action at a distance", ``state vector collapse",  and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen "paradox" are penalties for  disrespecting the Quantum Principle.  If Time permits,  I will quantize him too.