Public Lecture
The Edge of Atom Land: News from the Energy Frontier
Jon Butterworth
University College London
Wed, Aug 21, 5:30–6:30pm
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 placed physics in a position unique in history. We have an internally consistent theory of fundamental physics – the Standard Model – which scored a huge success by predicting that discovery. Yet the Standard Model is not a “theory of everything”. It leaves many key questions unanswered, and seems so far to provide little clue as to where those answers might lie. I will describe the current landscape and discuss options for continuing the exploration beyond our current map of subatomic physics.
About Jon Butterworth
Jon Butterworth is an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and Professor of Physics at University College London. He grew up in Manchester, took his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Oxford, then moved to DESY, Hamburg to work for Pennsylvania State University on the ZEUS experiment at the HERA electron-proton collider. He joined UCL in 1995, and was Physics Chair of ZEUS in 2003-2004. He was a physics convenor of ATLAS during first data taking (2010-2012). He won the Chadwick Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2013 for his pioneering experimental and phenomenological work in high-energy particle physics, especially in the understanding of hadronic jets. He was head of the department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL (2011-2018) and has written two books and many articles on particle physics for the general public.
Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series
Heinz R Pagels was a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, president of the New York Academy of Science, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years, serving as a participant, officer, and trustee. He was also President of the International League for Human Rights. His work on chaos theory inspired the character of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park book and movies. A part-time local resident, Professor Pagels died here in a mountaineering accident in 1988. His family and friends instituted the lecture series in his honor because he devoted a substantial part of his life to effective public dissemination of scientific knowledge.