Last night saw the third installment of Café Scientifique Syracuse. I reported before on our successful inaugural event, at which my biology colleague, Scott Erdman, spoke about the Human Genome Project. Last month’s installment turned out equally well. Our speaker was James Spencer, from Syracuse’s chemistry department, speaking about From Sherlock Holmes to CSI: Chemistry as a Forensic Science, on which he teaches a very successful course. That time we moved into an even larger room (essentially a nightclub bar) in our host establishment – Ambrosia.
Last night yours truly was the featured speaker, giving a talk on modern cosmology. We stayed in the large bar area in Ambrosia, and this time they left the small disco balls spinning during the whole event, which I thought helped to achieve just the right atmosphere. I don’t have a great picture of the event, but Rob Salgado sent me one of the place after we’d finished and a few people were hanging around chatting. You can even see the disco balls.
Obviously, you’d have to speak to one of the audience members to get an unbiased feel for how the talk went, but I certainly had a blast. There were around fifty people there, as there were the week before, and they listened politely during my 20-minute presentation and then, when we reconvened after sushi-snacks and drink refills, asked great questions.
Some questions were quite standard, such as “What was there before the Big Bang?”, some were technical, like “Can we change gravity and avoid that pesky dark energy?”, and some were vast, like “Strings?”. But they were all worth asking, and it was pretty challenging for me as the audience bounced along from topic to topic.
We’ve got some great stuff coming up also. On November 8th (our only violation of the “first Tuesday of every month” rule), Francis DiSalvo, who is John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and Director of the Cornell Center for Materials Research, is going to speak on Fuel Cells and Energy Policy, which should be great. Then, on December 6th, I’m hosting Mark Noble, from the Department of Biomedical Genetics at the University of Rochester Medical Center, who will speak about Stem Cells. Mark has written stem cell briefing guides for the New York State Stem Cell Coalition, and should give a stimulating talk. Also, when he emailed me with a suggestion of how to organize the time during his evening in Syracuse, I was impressed that the final line was “Discussion – till last call”. That’s the idea!
If any of you out there are thinking about organizing a branch of Café Scientifique in your area, I’d strongly encourage you to give it a go. We’re having a wonderful time at ours, and the informal feedback we’re getting is extremely positive. People are hungry for the opportunity to ask all kinds of questions about science, and you can make a real difference by helping them get answers.
October 5th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
[...] Last night, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending Cafe Scientifique in Syracuse. The featured speaker was Mark Trodden who talked for about 20 minutes or so on Cosmology and then spent about an hour answering all sorts of questions from the audience. Check out his entry at the Cosmic Variance blog. [...]
October 5th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
So what were your answers to the questions? I alwayslike to hear what cosmologists say about “What was before the Big Bang?” And why CAN’T we change gravity?
That “Strings?” question sounds funny because I can hear someone saying it in a sort of “Really?” sort of way.
October 6th, 2005 at 1:34 am
Hi Frank
I agree. “Strings?” was very funny. I realy enjoyed it. I can even imagine a lady with a half lost and half worried look in her face saying “strings?”
October 6th, 2005 at 7:25 am
Hi Frank. My answer to “What was before the Big Bang?” went something like this: (Understand, this is an attempt to give a quick, layman’s answer)
We understand the universe pretty well back to very early times, but at some stage our currently applicable theories – QM and GR – cease to be applicable because the extremely early universe is both very small and very dense. This means we need both QM and GR to work there and, as I mentioned earlier, they don’t play well together. We therefore require a quantum theory of gravity. We have very few ideas about how to make a successful one of these, for example string theory, and none of them have yet been able to tell us anything we can be confident about regarding the early universe. So my answer to the question is that we don’t even know whether it makes sense as a question yet, much work remains to be done and people are trying hard to push our understanding back to earlier and earlier times in the universe. “We don’t know.”
As for changing gravity. I told them we can change gravity, but that how we do it is highly constrained. I mentioned recent attempts in which I (and Sean) have been involved, what others are doing, and said it’s an area of active, but as yet speculative, research. Again, the main message is that this is a frontier topic, so like any good scientist all I can do is provide a feel for the research directions, be clear about what are tested results and what are speculations, and say “We don’t know yet”.
“Strings?” was the very first question and was asked by a nice smart man who was fascinated by the whole subject and who stayed around to ask a lot of good questions at the end. He really meant “I’ve heard of these things called strings, and heard that they might help solve some of the issues you mentioned. Can you tell us something about them?” I did my best, explained the broad stringy picture, why it was exciting, why it wasn’t part of our view of the real world yet, and gave some examples of how people were using string theory to try to address some cosmological questions.