Schrödinger had quite the imagination

Today, we bring you the very first edition of Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly curated list of interesting STEM-related talks, symposiums, and events happening on campus. For science and non-science majors alike, our list will bring you events that should satisfy your scientific curiosity for everything from astronomy to zoology, and everything in between.

For anyone (STEM-majors and non-majors alike):

  • Panel talk: “Urban Sustainability Measurement in China: Fostering a Race to the Top”
    • Tuesday, Jan 30, 2018: 6pm to 7pm in Low Library, Faculty Room (RSVP at the link above)
    • “Sustainability is now widely recognized as an essential component for development in China, with the Chinese government setting ambitious environmental and social targets… This event will explore the importance of a standardized system to assess sustainability at the local level.”
  • 2018 Energy Symposium
    • Thursday, February 1, 2018 – Friday, February 2, 2018 (all day) in Faculty House, 64 Morningside Dr
    • “The 13th Energy Symposium on February 1-2, 2018 will convene thought-leaders and practitioners from across the energy sector, representing industry, government, civil society, and the broader Columbia and New York community to explore key challenges and drivers impacting the energy system.”
  • “Swim Team”: A Medical Humanities Film Series
    • Monday, January 29, 2018: 6pm in Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room
    • “A film screening of ‘Swim Team’, an award winning feature documentary about a New Jersey YMCA based, community swim team made up of kids on the autism spectrum. The film follows three of team’s star athletes, boys on the cusp of adulthood, when government services become scarce.”
    • Hosted by Explorations in the Medical Humanities: As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine has offered a set of methodological approaches to address these challenges.

Intended for more advanced students of the given subject (but still open to anyone):

  • Chemistry: “Inverting Ligand Fields” – Colloquium featuring Dr. Roald Hoffmann
    • Thursday, February 1, 2018: 4:30pm – 5:30pm in 209 Havemeyer
    • “The aim of this talk is to explore strategies for inverting the normal ligand field order at a transition metal, of three below two in an octahedral environment, two below three in tetrahedral coordination, four below one in square-planar.”
  • Physics: “Schrödinger Cats, Maxwell’s Demon and Quantum Error Correction (That Works)” – Colloquium featuring Steven Girvin
    • Monday, January 29, 2018: 4:15pm in 428 Pupin Hall
    • “A ‘second quantum revolution’ is underway based on our new understanding of how information can be stored and manipulated using quantum hardware… This talk will present an elementary introduction to the field as well as an overview of recent experimental progress.”
  • Computer Science: “Innovative Design and Analysis for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles” – Talk by Dr. Chung-Wei Lin, Toyota InfoTechnology Center
    •  Tuesday, January 30, 2018: 2pm to 3pm in CS Conference Room
    • “Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous functions, and connected applications bring a revolution to automotive systems and software. In this talk, several ongoing research topics in the domain of automotive systems and software will be introduced”

Schrödinger’s Cat via TEDx