Events and Activities
of Friends of KITP
Check here for regular updates and new information!
November
Chalk Talk
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007, 5:30pm
at KITP, Kohn Hall, UCSB.
"First Things in the Universe", Professor Tom Abel, Stanford University. Eighty years ago, Edwin Hubble showed that the Universe is expanding. Sixty years ago, we learned where all the hydrogen and helium in the Universe were made. About 40 years ago, we started observing radiation left over from the Big Bang itself. Over the last 20 years, we’ve come to understand that without dark matter, there would be no galaxies nor any of us. Armed with the most sensitive detectors and largest supercomputers, yet, we are learning what happened in the first billion years of the Universe’s history. Theorists today predict the very first luminous object in the universe were isolated massive. These shaped their environments with the copious amounts of radiation they have emitted and the heavy elements thrown out in energetic supernovae. Quite a large number of your carbon and oxygen atoms in fact were made in these first hundreds of millions of years, some 13.5 billion years ago...
December
Public Lecture
Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 8:00pm
at KITP, Kohn Hall, UCSB.
There are substantial challenges (technical, political, and economic) involved with widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. Prof Nathan Lewis (Caltech) will present an overview of available fossil fuel resources and estimate the remaining years of supply of oil, gas, and coal for use in primary power production. These sources can then be compared to renewable energy technologies (wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass, hydroelectric, and geothermal) to evaluate the degree to which supply and demand may stimulate a transition to renewable energy technologies. A greenhouse gas constraint on total carbon emissions, in conjunction with global population growth, is projected to drive the demand for carbon-free power well beyond that produced by conventional pricing tradeoffs. This informs the R&D investments needed to produce the required quantity of carbon-free power by the 2050 timeframe, triggering evaluations of the energy potential of renewable energy resources and revealing scientific challenges to cost-effective production of carbon-free power by the 2050 timeframe.
January
Public Lecture
Thursday, January 24, 2008, 8:00pm
at KITP, Kohn Hall, UCSB.
In a talk titled "Look! Look! Up in the Sky! Citizen-Scientists and Sputnik: The Dawn of the Space Age," W. Patrick McCray, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss the little-known story of Operation Moonwatch, an amateur science program initiated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1956. Its initial goal was to enlist the aid of amateur astronomers and other citizens in helping professional scientists spot the first artificial satellites.
