Sean Carroll visiting Feb 5 and 6

A rock star of science communication will be visiting the UC Davis campus on Thursday Feb 5 and Friday Feb 6. Most broadly known for his public outreach, via books, blogs, and television show, radio show, and podcast appearances, Sean Carroll is a distinguished theoretical physicist and philosopher holding appointments at Johns Hopkins University and the Santa Fe Institute. Professor Carroll is an excellent communicator, at all levels, and our community is blessed to have three talks from him during this visit, as well as some opportunities for more informal interaction. 

Cosmology seminar
Thursday Feb 5 at 12:10 pm in 185 Physics
Complexogenesis

Abstract: The universe starts near the Big Bang with relatively low entropy, and seems aimed at a high-entropy heat death in the far future, all in accord with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the early universe was a simple place, and the future will also be simple; complexity is a transient phenomenon that appears and then disappears. I will talk about how to quantify the idea of complexity, how it relates to the enormous information resource provided by the low-entropy initial condition, and what physical mechanisms allow complexity to develop over cosmological time.

Astronomy on Tap
Thursday Feb 5 from 6-8pm at Sudwerk Brewing
Sean Carroll will talk about:
The Origin of Complexity in the Universe
and Andrew Wetzel will talk about:
Out of Chaos Comes Order: The History of our Milky Way Galaxy

Barrall Family Lecture Annual Series (Feb 6, 3pm to 5pm; Location: Walker Hall, Room 1310)
Finding Yourself in a Large Universe

Abstract: Modern physics frequently envisions scenarios in which the universe is very large indeed: large enough that any allowed local situation or observer is likely to exist more than once, perhaps an infinite number of times. Multiple copies of you might exist elsewhere in space, in time, or on other branches of the wave function. I will argue for a unified strategy for dealing with self-locating uncertainty that recovers the Born Rule of quantum mechanics in ordinary situations, and suggests a cosmological measure in a multiverse. The approach is fundamentally Bayesian, treating probability talk as arising from credences in conditions of uncertainty. Such an approach doesn't work in cosmologies dominated by random fluctuations (Boltzmann Brains), so I will argue in favor of excluding such models on the basis of cognitive instability.