Paul Steinhardt

Walker Ames Endowment

• Professor of Physics, Princeton University
• Director, Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics

January 22, 2013   |   6:30 p.m.
Kane Hall, Room 120

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• Please note: This lecture has reached its registration capacity. However, as a courtesy we will offer stand-by seating as traditionally we have no-shows. We will begin seating for walk-ups at 6:15 PM.

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Powered in partnership with the UW Alumni Association

Once Upon a Time in Kamchatka: The Extraordinary Search for Natural Quasicrystals

A quasicrystal is an exotic state of matter with symmetries once thought to be impossible for matter. The concept was first introduced and the first examples were synthesized in the laboratory 30 years ago, but could nature have beaten us to the punch? This talk will describe the search for the first natural quasicrystal, an adventure to the ends of the Earth and beyond and one of the stranger scientific stories you are ever likely to hear.

About Paul Steinhardt

Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, where he is also on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978-81 and on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981-98, where he was Mary Amanda Wood Professor from 1989-98. He is a Fellow in the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He shared the P.A.M. Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 2002 for his contribution to the development of the inflationary model of the universe; and the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2010 for his contribution to the theory of quasicrystals. He is the author of over 200 refereed articles, five patents, three technical books, numerous popular articles, and, in 2007, co-authored Endless Universe: The Big Bang and Beyond, a popular book on contemporary theories of cosmology. He is one of the co-discoverers of the first natural quasicrystal and recently organized a geological expedition to Chukotka in Far Eastern Russia to find new information about its origin and search for more samples.

Sponsoring Departments:

• UW Graduate School
• UW Alumni Association
• Department of Chemistry