December 7, 2009

‘World as a Hologram’ is topic of 2009 Brickwedde Lecture

Leonard Susskind, the Felix Bloch Professor of Physics at Stanford University, will give the 2009 Ferdinand G. Brickwedde Lecture in Physics on Tuesday, Dec. 8.

Titled “The World as a Hologram,” Susskind’s lecture will take place at 4 p.m. in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy’s Schafler Auditorium on the university’s Homewood campus.

Widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, Susskind in 1997 won the J.J. Sakurai Prize for his pioneering contributions to hadronic string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics and dynamical symmetry breaking.

He is known as an engaging and imaginative speaker with a rare ability to explain complex scientific concepts to lay audiences. In fact, Stanford has put a series of Susskind’s lectures on theoretical physics, including those on “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” and “Dark Matter vs. Dark Energy,” on YouTube.

The Brickwedde lectures were established in 1981 and are funded by an endowment provided by Johns Hopkins alumnus Ferdinand G. Brickwedde and his wife, Langhorne Howard Brickwedde.

Ferdinand Brickwedde, who received his bachelor’s degree in 1922 and doctorate in 1925, had a distinguished research and academic career. A co-discoverer of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, he was long associated with the National Bureau of Standards and from 1956 to 1963 was dean of the College of Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University, where he was Evan Pugh Research Professor of Physics Emeritus until his death in 1989.

As part of the lecture tradition, at least one outstanding scientist is invited to campus for a three-day period each academic year. During that visit, the scientists deliver a public address and the weekly departmental colloquium and, as stipulated by the Brickweddes, are asked to spend generous amounts of time with the students.