Nobel Prize winner to discuss

Nobel Prize winner to discuss ‘music of the void’ March 26

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Viewed from the perspective of fundamental theoretical physics, matter behaves in ways that look very different from our everyday reality, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek will describe the strangeness and beauty of the universe from this perspective at Rice University’s annual William V. Houston Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. Monday, March 26. The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Physics and Astronomy and will be held in the Physics Amphitheater, Herzstein Hall.

In his abstract for the talk, titled ”The Universe is a Strange Place,” Wilczek said, ”We’ve come to understand that the building blocks of matter appear as notes in a music of the void. I’ll describe this using a combination of facts, pictures and jokes. Finally, I’ll discuss some recent discoveries indicating that the world is even stranger than we’ve understood so far, and how we’re rising to the challenge.”

Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT. As a 21-year-old graduate student working at Princeton, Wilczek made the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of ”asymptotic freedom,” which provided the key to understanding the strong nuclear force and led to the development of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

Since then, Wilczek has made numerous contributions to particle physics, condensed-matter physics and cosmology, including pioneering work on axions, fractional statistics, matter-antimatter asymmetry, QCD at high temperature and high density, and the quantum properties of black holes.

The annual Houston Memorial Lecture is a tribute to former Rice President William Houston, a renowned physicist who led the university from 1946 to 1960.