KITP director and conference organizer David J. Gross, the first incumbent of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at UCSB, has just been awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving in 1973 the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called "the Standard Model" of the quantum mechanical picture of reality. He and his co-recipients discovered how the nucleus of atoms works.
Gross shares the prize with another of the conference participants Frank Wilczek, now a physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was Gross's graduate student at Princeton University, when the pair completed the calculation that resulted in the discovery for which they have received the Nobel Prize. (The other recipient, H. David Politzer, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, was working independently on a similar calculation.)
The conference is timed to coincide with the dedication of the new addition to the building Kohn Hall, which houses the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Most of the conference participants will speak, but they will not be giving their standard talks describing the status of their own research. In formats designed to enhance discussion, they will identify, debate, and summarize the key developments in physics over the past 25 years; they will assess the current status of the physics fields; and they will envision the course of physics over the next 25 years. The conference is organized around short talks and panel discussions detailed at
Contact: Jacquelyn Savani
jsavani@kitp.ucsb.edu
805-963-8324
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
7-Oct-2004