Saturday Science Lecture with Mike Ogilvie on Connections

Connections is the title of a popular 10-episode BBC documentary series and a companion book from 1978, written and produced by the science historian James Burke. The series emphasized the interplay of ideas and personalities as they played out in history. Ogilvie will try to recapture some of the flavour of the series using two key ideas of modern physics, critical universality and duality, which together challenge our ideas about the relation of order and chaos. These two concepts link the phases of water to the behavior of magnets and many other physical phenomena, even the fundamental building blocks of our universe. We will start with the work of one graduate student whose 1924 PhD thesis eventually made his name familiar to all physicists, which will lead us to a Nobel prize winner who carried out his work under the yoke of Stalinism. This will in turn lead us to two men who won every every physics prize but the Nobel, and one man who did win it. We will  finish in the 21^st century with gauge/gravity duality and its application to many areas of physics.

The Zoom link will be sent via email to everyone on our email list before each lecture. Those wishing to join the email list should email a request to physics@wustl.edu.