Past Gurevitch Memorial Lectures
13th Annual Lecture, May 24, 2019
Dr. Hakeem M. Oluseyi
Astrophysicist and Space Science Education Lead, NASA
Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Aerospace, Physics & Space Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology
"Hacking the Stars"
In modern times, the word hack has come to mean repurposing something in new or creative ways in order to gain benefit or cleverly solve a tricky problem. Historically, the word “stars” was used to refer to one’s future fate through the association of stars with astrological prognostication. In this talk I’ll describe how I’ve utilized observations and theory of the Sun and stars to not only advance knowledge of the objects under study but also to develop new technologies and progress understanding of other systems. I’ll also describe how I hacked my own stars to rise above the circumstances of my youth to become a successful scientist and one of the world’s most recognizable public intellectuals. The research component of my talk will describe how my graduate students and I used the identification of scale-invariant ion acceleration processes in the solar corona to design an innovative experiment for initiating 3D magnetic reconnection in the laboratory, producing ~3,000 km/s ion beams suitable for in-space propulsion and more. I’ll also describe how we have used machine learned identification and classification of periodic variables in astronomical surveys of tens of millions of stars to develop new stellar diagnostics and time-domain informatics techniques, discover previously unknown Milky Way satellites and tidal streams, place constraints on Galactic evolution, and measure the Milky Way’s gravitational potential constraining its dark matter distribution.
12th Annual Lecture, May 11, 2018
Dr. David Wineland
2012 Nobel Prize for Physics
Department of Physics
University of Oregon
"Optical Atomic Clocks"
For many centuries, and continuing today, a primary application of accurate clocks is for precise navigation. For example, GPS enables us to determine our distance from the (known) positions of satellites by measuring the time it takes for a pulse of radiation emitted by the satellite to reach us. The more accurately we can measure this time, the more accurate our position is known.
Atoms absorb electromagnetic radiation at precise discrete frequencies. Knowing this, a recipe for making an atomic clock is simple to state: we first need an oscillator to produce the radiation and a device that tells us when the atoms absorb it. To make a clock from this setup, we then simply count cycles of the oscillator; the duration of a certain number of cycles defines a unit of time, for example, the second. Today, the most accurate clocks count cycles of radiation corresponding to optical wavelengths, around a million billion per second. To achieve high accuracy, many interesting effects, including those due to Einstein’s relativity, must be accounted for.
Dr. Wineland received his bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley and both his MS and PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1975 until 2017. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Optical Society. During his time at NIST he founded their ion storage group, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1992), and was the recipient of many awards, including the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science (2001), the National Medal of Science (2007), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2012). He has recently moved to Eugene to accept a position at the University of Oregon.
11th Annual Lecture, May 19, 2017
Dr. Janna Levin
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Barnard College of Columbia University
"Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space"
In her new book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Levin offers the authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—the soundtrack to astronomy’s silent movie. But why was this scientific campaign so significant? And what does it mean for the sciences—and humanity—in general?
Over a billion years ago, two black holes collided. In the final second of their life together, they banged out a rhythm like mallets on a drum, creating gravitational waves—waves in the shape of spacetime. Over the billion years since, we evolved and pointed telescopes at the sky, discovered a universe in which we are not central, squabbled and warred, and have nearly driven ourselves to extinction. One hundred years ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. Over the past five decades, a few experimentalists, disconnected from mainstream concerns, struggled to devise observatories to do the improbable, if not outright impossible: record Lilliputian waves in the shape of space. As the echo of those black holes approached just beyond our solar system, billion-dollar instruments known collectively as LIGO underwent an upgrade here on Earth. As the instruments came online—a sophisticated global microphone pointed at the sky—the first gravitational wave sound ever recorded came from the southern sky, struck the instrument in Louisiana, then Washington. And with these new observatories, so much has changed.
Dr. Levin has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at UC Berkeley, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge University and the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford University, where she won an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts. Levin holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy from Barnard College with a concentration in Philosophy, and a PhD from MIT in Physics. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012.
10th Annual Lecture, June 1, 2016
Prof. Shuji Nakamura
2014 Nobel Prize for Physics
Materials Department of the College of Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara
The invention of high efficiency blue LEDs and future lighting
In the 1970's and 80’s, high efficiency blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were the last missing elements required to make white LED solid-state display and lighting technologies. At that time, III-nitride alloys were regarded as the least probable candidates for this technology. However, a series of unexpected breakthroughs in the 1990's changed this, and in 1993 the first high efficiency blue LEDs were invented and commercialized. Nowadays, III-nitride-based LEDs have become a widely used light source for many applications.
LED light bulbs are more than ten times as efficient as incandescent bulbs, and they last for up to 50 years. At their current adoption rates, LEDs have the potential to reduce the world’s need for electricity by the equivalent of nearly 60 nuclear power plants by 2020.
Dr. Nakamura specializes in the field of semiconductor technology. He is professor at the Materials Department of the College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the inventor of the blue LED, a major breakthrough in lighting technology for which he received the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics.