"Angels & Demons: The Science Revealed: Why physicists would love to trap antihydrogen, but the Vatican need not fear..." is about the science behind Dan Brown's novel and the new movie "Angels & Demons" that premieres May 15, 2009. Professor Joel Fajans will give the lecture, suitable for all levels of understanding. In the Sony Pictures Entertainment movie directed by Ron Howard, actor Tom Hanks investigates a plot to destroy the Vatican using antimatter made at the Large Hadron Collider and stolen from the European particle physics laboratory CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The free lecture, presented by the campus' Department of Physics, is one of more than 40 talks scheduled this month in Canada and the United States to draw attention to particle physics, the science of antimatter and CERN's newest instrument, the Large Hadron Collider. http://physics.berkeley.edu/
It was once thought that gravity and quantum mechanics were inconsistent with one another. Instead, we are discovering that they are so closely connected that one can almost say they are the same thing. Professor Susskind will explain how this view came into being over the last two decades, and illustrate how a number of gravitational phenomena have their roots in the ordinary principles of quantum mechanics. Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, and quantum cosmology.