*** NEW LOCATION: World Café Live Upstairs, 3025 Walnut St. 6-7 pm****
Our next event:
April 23: Elliot Lipeles
The Higgs Discovery: Giant experiments to find the smallest specks of matter
Elliot Lipeles, professor of physics, joined the search for the Higgs boson eight years ago and has participated in its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider. People have been searching for the Higgs bosons for almost 50 years, since its conception as a particle hypothesized to resolve unexplained issues in our models of how particles interact, including giving mass to the particles we know. Lipeles will explain the experiments that established the existence of this fundamentally new particle, the concepts behind the experiment, and gaze a bit in to the future of what the next steps are.
The talk is part of the Science Café, a free public-lecture series presented by the School of Arts and Sciences and the Office of University Communications that takes arts, humanities and social-sciences scholarship out of the classroom for a night on the town. Café events are free and open to the public, but RSVPs are encouraged. For more information or directions, contact Gina Bryan at 215-898-8721 or email bryangm@pobox.upenn.edu. Menu items will be available for purchase.
February 26: Salamishah Tillet
From Douglass to Django: Slavery and Freedom in the Age of Obama
This past year, Hollywood revived the twin themes of slavery and freedom in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Slavery is the historical backdrop in each film against which contemporary artists and audiences can gauge racial problems or progress. Drawing on her book Sites of Slavery, Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination Tillet will put these cinematic conversations in context with discussion on how contemporary African-American artists like Bill T. Jones, Toni Morrison and Kara Walker reimagine slavery in order to challenge a national silence about racial inequality in the present and model a more robust democracy for the future.
March 26: Jessica Ho
Why Does U.S. Life Expectancy Rank So Low?
Life expectancy in the United States is among the lowest of all high-income countries. Americans have a lower life expectancy at age 50 and experience higher levels of disease and disability than do their counterparts in other industrialized nations. Jessica Ho, a doctoral candidate in demography and sociology, will discuss her research on the nation's mortality and discuss policies both to prevent the major causes of death below age 50 and to reduce social inequalities to improve our ranking.
April 16: Justin McDaniel Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life
Last spring, Justin McDaniel, associate professor and department chair of religious studies, taught an experimental course on monastic and ascetic ways of living. During the course students "turned off" and "turned away" from normal modes of interaction and communication in an effort to "live deliberately." They maintained a strict code of silence in and out of the classroom, and stopped all forms of electronic and Internet technology while undertaking serious eating and spending restrictions. Meditation, ritual, and physical discipline were also part of their daily lives. McDaniel will discuss the course and a few of his students will share their experiences.
March 12: Jane Willenbring
Back to the Future: Antarctica in a Warming World
Antarctica's ice sheets behave very differently from each other and Greenland's ice sheet. Assistant Professor Jane Willenbring of Earth and Environmental Science will talk about why they are different, how we predict what they will do in the future and what this means for estimates of future sea level rise.
April 2: Sharon Thompson-Schill
Thinking Differently: The Upside and Downside of Cognitive Control
The Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Sharon Thompson-Schill studies how the brain gives rise to major aspects of the human experience. Advances in this field have led to surprising discoveries about how things we consider to be immutable parts of our personal identities—such as memories or language—are sometimes at the mercy of chemical reactions in our neurons. Through a clever experiment, Thompson-Schill and her colleagues have recently shown that a bit of electrical stimulation to a certain brain structure can turn down the filter that keeps our thoughts on track, which has the paradoxical effect of making us better at solving some kinds of creative problems. Thompson-Schill will explain the psychology and neuroscience behind this fascinating discovery, and show how ways of thinking that might be a weakness in one area can be helpful in another.
April 23: Elliot Lipeles
The Higgs Discovery: Giant experiments to find the smallest specks of matter
Elliot Lipeles, professor of physics, joined the search for the Higgs boson eight years ago and has participated in its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider. People have been searching for the Higgs bosons for almost 50 years, since its conception as a particle hypothesized to resolve unexplained issues in our models of how particles interact, including giving mass to the particles we know. Lipeles will explain the experiments that established the existence of this fundamentally new particle, the concepts behind the experiment, and gaze a bit in to the future of what the next steps are.
