Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar William Bialek
- November 1, 2016
- 4:30 PM - 6:00 CST
- Life Sciences Building, Room 142
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Phi Beta Kappa
Dr. Ronald Greenberg, rig@cs.luc.edu - free
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all
Open to the public. - Add to calendar
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Details
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.