Hey folks, forwarded info of an upcoming lecture: FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE LECTURE Strange Views of Space and Time: From Einstein to String Theory Lecturer: Gary T. Horowitz, professor of physics, UC-Santa Barbara Date: Weds, October 8, 2003 Time: 7:30 p.m. Place: Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology auditorium, University of Utah FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Modern physics has presented a picture of space and time which is very different from our usual "common sense" understanding. Precise experiments have confirmed that space and time really do have very strange properties. Most of these properties were predicted by Einstein. In this talk, professor Horowitz will describe some of them, including: 1) The time you experience depends on your state of motion. This means that not only your mechanical watch, but also your biological clock which governs aging, proceed at different rates depending on how you move in space. The time you experience also depends on nearby gravitational fields. Time slows down in a gravitational field. 2) Different people can disagree about which things happen at the same time. The notion of two events being simultaneous is not fundamentally well defined. 3) Space is curved by matter. Light rays, traveling along the straightest possible paths, are bent when they pass near heavy objects. Black holes are excellent examples of this. Modern work on string theory has suggested even more strange properties of space and time. Although they have not yet been confirmed by experiment, many physicists take them seriously. These include the possibility that space has more than three dimensions. Horowitz will explain what this means and why it does not obviously conflict with observations of our world. Some recent speculation about these extra dimensions includes the possibility of parallel universes. Professor Horowitz will give a live radio interview on KCPW 88.3 FM on Monday, October 6, 9:40 AM. The College of Science and the College of Mines and Earth Sciences are working together this year to offer an expanded schedule of presentations. A total of five lectures will be given in the 2003-2004 academic year. Frontiers of Science talks are free and open to the public. Videotapes are also available to the public. For more information, please contact the College of Science at 581-6958 or visit www.science.utah.edu.