PUBLIC LECTURES
FCFULL CONFERENCEGAGENERAL AUDIENCE
FRIDAY, 30 NOVEMBER, 18:00-20:00, AUDITORIUM UMBERTO AGNELLI, ISTOTUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA TOKYO
PUBLIC LECTURE PRESENTERS
DECRYPTING THE UNIVERSE
James Beacham, CERN Friday, 30 November, 06:00-07:00 p.m.
Every second of every day, a particle called a muon zooms through your head as a result of cosmic rays smashing into atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. In the same amount of time, about a billion particles of a mysterious stuff called dark matter swarm through your body. You’ve never felt this stuff, so how do we know it’s there? What is the universe trying to tell us with these invisible messengers? Join Dr. James Beacham, particle physicist at CERN, as he explores how physicists extract complex patterns from the universe, from using powerful new advancements in muography to see inside volcanos and pyramids — among many other applications — to using the biggest science experiment in history, the Large Hadron Collider, to see what the universe was like just after the moment of the Big Bang, fourteen billion years ago, to explain the current mysteries of dark matter, quantum black holes, and the Higgs boson. How do we decode nature’s messages? How can we “see” what cannot be seen?
James Beacham
Dr. James Beacham searches for answers to the biggest open questions of physics using the largest experiment ever, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He hunts for dark matter, gravitons, quantum black holes, and dark photons as a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. In addition to his research, he is a frequent speaker at sci/tech/art events around the world, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal Institution, SXSW, and the BBC. His talk, “How we explore unanswered questions in physics”, was featured on TED.com and has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times. He contributes to podcasts, radio shows, and documentaries, and has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo, among others. Beacham trained as a filmmaker before becoming a physicist and regularly collaborates with artists. In 2015 he launched Ex/Noise/CERN, a project exploring the connections between particle physics and experimental music and film.
ARTISTS AND PHYSICISTS UNITE WORLD WIDE
Michael Hoch, CERN Friday, 30 November, 07:00-08:00 p.m.
“When I started to exhibit my work, I noticed that art can help make complex scientific issues understandable. And that inspires curiosity about the big questions of mankind—even in societal circles that are not especially scientific. Artistically, I can only show my personal viewpoint. I reconciled this with my scientific side by inviting other artists to take part in the CMS Experiment. That’s how art@CMS came about,”photographer and CERN particle physicist Dr. Michael Hoch said in an interview with Whitewall Magazine. He has now expanded the concept of art@cms to the ORIGIN Network, (a collaboration including CERN based experiments: CMS, ATLAS, ALICE, LIGO/VIRGO, and the Muographers). In this talk, he will discuss how art@cms and the Fine-Art Muographers, soon to be joined by other art/science partnerships in the ORIGIN Network, enable professional artists, high school artists and college student artists opportunities to interact with and become inspired by particle physicists.