[Seminar] Colloquium & public lecture - Tuesday March 27th, 2007

[Marco Cavaglia]

Hello!

Next week colloquium will be given by Dr. Virginia Trimble (Department of
Physics and Astronomy, University of California @ Irvine):

The Quest for Other Worlds

More than 2000 years ago, Epicurus taught that there are an infinite
number of worlds both like and unlike ours, and Aristotle taught that
there are none. Neither hypothesis can currently be falsified. But what
astronomers and other scholars have meant by "other worlds" has evolved
through at least four rather different interpretations, each of which has
an analog in modern astrophysics (from the search for life on Mars to the
possible existence of other dimensions and the multiverse). The talk will
follow these ideas from the ancient Greeks down to the present and take a
look at the kinds of planets we have recently found orbiting other stars
and what it would take to find out whether any could be another Earth. It
will also touch briefly on modern equivalents of the other interpretations
of aperoi kosmoi ("plenitude of worlds").

The talk begins at 4:00pm in Lewis 101. Attendance is mandatory for all
graduate students.

The colloquium will be followed at 8pm by a public lecture. Details at:
http://www.olemiss.edu/cgi-bin/cal2000open/topadmin.pl?action=displayevent&event_id=8457

Cheers,
Marco