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Science literacy

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Having the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes necessary to make informed decisions on scientific issues.

PPPL intern Joseph Labrum helped build components for a “zero knowledge” system that may have applicability to future nuclear arms control agreements

Joseph Labrum spent his summer internship building components to upgrade an experiment that successfully compared physical objects without learning anything about the objects themselves. Such a “zero-knowledge protocol” system is a promising first step toward a technique that could possibly be used in future disarmament agreements, pending the results of further development, testing, and evaluation. While important questions remain, it might have potential application to verify that nuclear warheads are in fact true warheads without revealing classified information.

COLLOQUIUM: Better Cities Through Imaging

With millions of interacting people and hundreds of governing agencies, urban environments are the largest, most dynamic, and most complex macroscopic systems on Earth. The interaction between the three fundamental components of that system (human, natural, and built) can be studied much like any physical system, with observation and application of physical principles to the collection and analysis of that data.

COLLOQUIUM: Pilot-wave hydrodynamics

A decade ago, Yves Couder and coworkers discovered that droplets walking on a vibrating fluid bath exhibit several features previously thought to be exclusive to the microscopic, quantum realm. These walking droplets propel themselves by virtue of a resonant interaction with their own wavefield, and so represent the first macroscopic realization of a pilot-wave system of the form proposed for microscopic quantum dynamics by Louis de Broglie in the 1920s.

COLLOQUIUM: Are You Living In A Simulation?

Recently Nick Bostrom has argued that unless we are living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor simulation. While present-day simulations of the laws of nature are rather primitive, the constraint of finite computational resources implies calculable deviations of observables from naive expectations. Using present-day lattice quantum chromodynamics simulations as a guide, I will consider various physical quantities, including the distribution of the highest-energy cosmic rays, and the magnetic moment of the muon.

COLLOQUIUM: Chaotic Dynamics in the Physical Sciences

 Chaos was discovered near the end of the 19th century in the seminal work of Henri Poincare. However, widespread impact of chaotic dynamics accompanied by rapid development of understand did not occur until a relatively long after Poincare's work (of the order of 90 years). This talk will review some this history and give some examples illustrating the broad range of these more recent developments and applications.

COLLOQUIUM: Estimating the Age of Life Using Moore's Law

Moore's law is an empirical observation that the complexity of computer chips measured by the number of transistors doubles every 18-24 months. Because there is similarity between the evolution of human technology and living organisms, it is intriguing if an exponential increase in complexity can be found in the evolution of living organisms. Functional complexity of organisms can be roughly approximated by the size of non-redundant functional genome. It appears that genome complexity indeed increased nearly exponentially and doubled in size every 340 million years.

Students do cool summer research projects in one of the hottest spots

More than 40 college students pursuing careers in physics, engineering and computer science are spending their summer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory working with scientists and engineers on hands-on research projects.  Here they talk about the cool science they did at the Lab, which is devoted to fusion energy and plasma science research.

Fun and inspiration for 575 young women at PPPL’s Young Women’s Conference

Some 575 seventh- to tenth-grade girls from throughout New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania and Maryland, found fun and inspiration doing myriad hands-on activities and meeting female scientists at The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s 15th annual Young Women’s Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) on March 18. They talked to investigators from the FBI, watched colorful infrared images of themselves, played with robots, learned about electronics and plasma physics, saw cool chemistry, and heard about careers in STEM.

Fun and inspiration for 575 young women at PPPL’s Young Women’s Conference

Some 575 seventh- to tenth-grade girls from throughout New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania and Maryland, found fun and inspiration doing myriad hands-on activities and meeting female scientists at The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s 15th annual Young Women’s Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) on March 18. They talked to investigators from the FBI, watched colorful infrared images of themselves, played with robots, learned about electronics and plasma physics, saw cool chemistry, and heard about careers in STEM. 

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