Nobel Prize winner lectures on “Stone Cold Science”

Eric Cornell, 2001 Nobel prizewinner in physics, will deliver “Stone Cold Science: Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Weird World of Physics a Millionth of a Degree from Absolute Zero, " at 8 p.m. tonight (5/7) in 131 Hitchcock Hall, 2070 Neil Avenue.

Cornell will deliver the Annual Smith Lecture, which is given yearly by a physicist renowned not only for their scientific achievements but also for the ability to communicate their scientific breakthroughs to the general public. Of the Smith Lecturers since 1960, 17 have been Nobel Prize winners.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

As atoms get colder, they behave more like waves and less like particles. When a gas of atoms gets so cold that the "waviness" of one atom overlaps the waviness of another, the result is a sort of quantum mechanical identity crisis, a “condensation” predicted 70 years ago by Albert Einstein and S. N. Bose. Cornell will discuss how to reach the necessary record-low temperature, and explain why he goes to all the trouble to create this bizarre state of matter.

Cornell, a scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, earned his B.S. from Stanford in 1985 and his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1990. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle.

WHAT:Nobel Prize winning physicist Eric Cornell will deliver the Annual Smith Lecture

WHEN: 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7.

WHERE: 131 Hitchcock Hall, 2070 Neil Ave.

WHY: The Smith Lecture offers cool science to the Ohio State community and the
general public.