Welcome back to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.

Physics Colloquium: “Galaxies as Probes of the Particle Physics Nature of Dark Matter” with Dr. Mariangela Lisanti

  • Monday, January 22, 2024, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm
  • In-person at the Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall Eighth Floor)
  • “The hypothesis of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) has been spectacularly confirmed on the largest scales of the Universe and must now be stress-tested on sub-galactic scales.   Many well-motivated and generic alternatives to CDM can leave spectacular signatures on precisely these scales, affecting the evolution of galaxies as well as their population statistics. […] As a concrete example, I will describe the consequences for galaxy formation when the dark matter can self-scatter, highlighting the scenario where the interactions are dissipative and a sub-component of the dark matter efficiently cools inside galaxies.” More information here. 

Physics Seminar: “Dos and Don’ts of Folding Time” with Sebastian Mizera

  • Monday, January 22, 2024, at 2:10 pm
  • In person at the Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall Eighth Floor)
  • “I will summarize recent progress in uncovering the analytic structure of scattering amplitudes. The overarching theme will be exploiting new intricate ways of analytically continuing time, extending beyond the Wick rotation. I will highlight a broad range of applications: from high-precision calculations in particle physics, through computations of gravitational waves, to formal topics in the scattering of strings.” More information here. 

Constantine Nakassis – Voicing, Looking, Perspective

  • Wednesday, January 24, 2024 from 2:10 to 4:00 pm
  • In-person at Schermerhorn Extension (Room 963)
  • “What, semiotically speaking, is a perspective? Synthesizing the notions of voicing in linguistic anthropology and looking in film and visual studies with Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized perception, Constantine Nakassis situates perspective as a constitutive feature of semiosis, and vice versa, sign activity as constitutive of how perspectives evenementially and historically emerge and circulate. To exemplify this process, he analyzes select aspects of the 2018 trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald. He focuses in particular on the contextualized courtroom use of a forensic digital animation created by the defense to provide the perspective of Van Dyke in the event of his murder of McDonald.” More information here.

Paige West – Living a Collaborative Scholarly Life

  • Wednesday, January 24, 2024, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm
  • In-person at Fayerweather Hall (Room 513)
  • “Paige West will talk about her fifteen-year partnership with Indigenous activist and fisheries management expert John Aini, and the work they do with twenty-two communities in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea as well as the two decades of collaboration that she has undertaken with her colleagues from Papua New Guinea, with whom she founded the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research.” More information here. 

Lorraine Daston – Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate

  • Wednesday, January 24, 2024, from 6:15 to 7:45 pm
  • In-person at Pulitzer Hall (World Room). Registration required. 
  • “Why is the scientific community so unified? In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work? Rivals: How, Learned to Cooperate is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries…” More information here. 

Physics Seminar: “Spacetime topology and chaos in quantum black holes” with Phil Saad

  • Thursday, January 25, 2024 at 1:10 pm
  • In-person at the Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor)
  • “The thermal nature of black holes indicates that their underlying dynamics is chaotic. Chaotic quantum systems are believed to exhibit certain universal behaviors related to the statistics of their spectrum of microstates, sometimes known as ‘RMT universality’. I explain how spacetimes with nontrivial topology (‘spacetime wormholes’) explain many of these features for black holes in low-dimensional toy models, though the essential ingredients have clear generalizations to higher-dimensional black holes…” More information here. 

Environmental Casteism and Climate Disaster

  • Friday, January 26, 2024, 10:00 to 11:30 am
  • Online over Zoom. Registration required. 
  • “An examination on how the climate crisis is reinforcing the vulnerabilities of oppressed communities and highlighting the importance of an anti-caste framework for research and practice.” Featuring scholar Srilata Sircar and Pulitzer-Grantee Journalist Suprakash Majumdar, Deepali Srivastava, editor of CGEP’s Energy Explained, and Dr. Anupama Rao, director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. More information here.

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