PHYSICS SLAM 2013 Moderated by Chris Miller and Featuring Don Lincoln, Hugh Lippincott, Tia Miceli, Brian Nord & Chris Polly Friday, November 15, 2013 @ 8 p.m. Tickets - $7

Multiple physicists duke it over in short presentations about their respective topics. YOU get to choose which one does it best! This event sold out to an enthusiastic audience last year, and we are sure it will sell out again, so order early!

OUR CONTENDERS

Speaker: Don Lincoln
Title: Recreating the Big Bang in the Lab

Synopsis: Long before the invention of writing, people have wondered about big questions, questions like: how the universe came into existence and what is the ultimate nature of reality? Over 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greek philosophers started a process that has evolved into our modern formal scientific methods. Using these modern methods and data taken at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists are now becoming able to answer some of these timeless questions. In his presentation, Dr. Don Lincoln will describe the research performed by the CMS collaboration, the research team of which he is a member. This research includes such lofty goals and achievements as: (a) reconstructing the conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after it began; (b) searching for the ultimate building blocks of the cosmos; (c) investigating whether there are more dimensions of space than the familiar three; and (d) a little thing called the discovery of the Higgs boson. This research program is the most fascinating one of modern physics and he's looking forward to sharing it with you.

Bio: Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at Fermilab and adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame. His scientific accomplishments include being the co-discoverer of both the top quark and the Higgs boson and he is co-author of over 500 scientific papers. He also writes about science for public audiences, including online articles, blogging for the television show NOVA, articles for Scientific American and several books. His book The Quantum Frontier still is the highest selling book for the public about the Large Hadron Collider and his newest book Alien Universe about the biology of extraterrestrials is coming out in October.

Speaker: Hugh Lippincott
Title: Hunting for Dark Matter

Synopsis: 95% of the Universe is a mystery to humanity. A significant part of that mystery is called dark matter, which is basically a romantic name for matter that does not interact with light in the usual way. Without dark matter, large scale structure would not have formed and we wouldn't be here to enjoy events like the Physics Slam, and yet we don't really know anything about dark matter except that it exists. This talk will cover why we think it exists, what we think it might be, and how we go about trying to detect it.

Bio: Hugh Lippincott is a postdoc at Fermilab whose research is focused on the direct detection of dark matter particles. It's quite possible that the last 10 years of his life have been spent looking for something that might not ever be found, but he tries not to think about that too often. When he's not in Chicago or Batavia, he spends a lot of time wearing a blue jumpsuit and a hair net over a mile underground in a nickel mine in Northern Ontario, in a place called SNOLAB that really could be the set of a 1980s science fiction movie. This will be his first Physics Slam, or really Slam of any sort.

Speaker: Tia Miceli
Title: The Case Files of the Neutrino

Synopsis: Join Detective Tia Miceli Ph.D. as she lays out the unsolved mysteries surrounding the elusive and nefarious neutrino. She will review the closed cases where the neutrino was the perpetrator. These cases illuminate the nature of neutrinos. Detective Tia will then incriminate conspirators in the open cases of "The Dark Matter Investigations" and "Symmetry Violations". Will her team crack the case? Come and find out!

Bio: Tia Miceli received her Ph.D. in 2013 and B.S. in 2006, both in Physics, from the University of California, Davis. She measured Z bosons decaying to neutrinos and hunted for extra-dimensions on the CMS experiment while at CERN and Fermilab for her dissertation under Prof. Mani Tripathi. Throughout those years the mystery of the neutrino sparked her investigative mind, leading her to seek out a postdoctoral research position with New Mexico State University (NMSU) on the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab, one of the premier institutes in the world for studying neutrinos. NMSU Prof. Stephen Pate and Prof. Vassili Papavassiliou introduced her to the capabilities of neutrinos to probe the proton's spin structure. In her spare time, she gives physics pod-casts, paints watercolor, salsa dances, and practices the martial art of Aikido.

Speaker: Brian Nord
Title: Cosmic Nightly News: A Day in the Life of the Universe

Synopsis: The Cosmic Nightly News (CNN) is the flagship evening news program for the Cosmic Broadcasting System, airing since the year 3030 and reporting via affiliates and bureaus in 137 galaxies and 300,000 star systems. The first inter-galactic news program of the human species, CNN has been covering galactic and universal events since humanity became a Type IIIb civilization. Cosmic Nightly News broadcasts from the renewed human colony on Saturn's Titan 2 moon, the first reconstructed planetary body after Worlds War II. CNN delivers a unique brand of in-depth coverage on all cosmic events all the way to the edge of humanity's discovery boundary --- from space-time rips and transportation to inter-species politics and planet-building. This week's top stories include "Dark energy: do we really understand its effects on space-time?"; "Humanity has harnessed stellar fury, but are we good stewards of cosmic energy --- the space-time 'climate' crisis" and of course, the "Nightly space weather -- supernovae coming to a system near you."

Bio: Brian Nord is the anchor and managing editor for the Nightly News on the Cosmic Broadcasting System. He has also been a postdoctoral researcher at FermiLab since stardate, 3042.09.00, where he works for the Dark Energy Survey. Nord was previously the junior Galaxy Cluster Correspondent, at a local CBS affiliate in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he received his PhD in simulating the Universe. He is known for his coverage of the winding down of Pulsar N8312 and of the disappearance of Schrodinger Probe A, the first (and last) satellite to enter a black hole; it remains unknown how Nord returned from beyond the event horizon to bring that story.

Speaker: Chris Polly
Title: Universal mysteries: Revealing clues with mus

Synopsis: With its discovery high in the mountains of Colorado, the muon ushered in one of the greatest periods of mystery and intrigue in the history of science. Ironically, in the intervening years, this enigmatic particle has transformed from suspect to super sleuth.

Bio: Chris Polly is a Fermilab scientist and the project manager of the muon g-2 experiment that made national headlines this summer with the move of a 50-ft diameter electromagnet from New York to Chicago.

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