Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar William Bialek

  • November 1, 2016
  • 4:30 PM - 6:00 CST
  • Life Sciences Building, Room 142
  • Dr. Ronald Greenberg, rig@cs.luc.edu
  • free
  • all
    Open to the public.
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    The Galilean imperative: A physicist's search for simplicity

    Nearly 400 years ago, Galileo gave us the image of the great Book of
    Nature, lying open before us. We could read it, he said, only if we
    understood its language - the language of mathematics. The search for
    a mathematical description of nature, an activity we now call
    theoretical physics, has been extraordinarily successful. In a real
    sense, what we see around us are the consequences of equations that
    can be written on one sheet of paper. This tremendous success
    encourages physicists to keep searching for simplicity, even in
    apparently complex systems. Why do we believe that the world should
    be described by simple models? Is this just an extrapolation from past
    successes, liable to fail at any moment?   Faced with the evident
    complexity of the world, is the search for simple mathematical
    descriptions just a matter of guessing, or are there principles to
    guide our search? I¿ll address these questions with lessons from the
    history of the subject, then turn to one of the modern frontiers: the
    search for a physicist¿s understanding of the brain and mind.