Session B6: Invited Session: FPS Awards Session

Joseph A. Burton Forum Award Talk

At the end of August 1967, while a summer visitor to Los Alamos, I witnessed two atomic bomb tests in Nevada. One of these was ``Smoky'' which became notorious because of the use of American soldiers in close maneuvers. This is depicted in the documentary The Atomic Cafe. This test, one of 29, was part of the Plumbbob Series in which over 300 kilotons of nuclear explosions took place above ground some sixty miles from a major American city, Las Vegas. As insane as this may appear to us now, it did serve to make concrete the menace of nuclear weapons which have come to seem more and more like an abstraction.   

Leo Szilard Lectureship Award Talk: From Reductionism to Complexity; A Theoretical Physicist's Journey into Biology and the Social Sciences

In this talk I review how a high energy physicist serendipitously migrated from quarks and gluons, dark matter and string theory to thinking about equally big topics like why we live for 100 years (and not a thousand or 2-3 like a mouse), how is this generated from molecular time scales, why do we sleep and where does 8 hours come from, and how is this related to the rate at which we evolve, can there be a quantitative, mathematisable science of cities and companies, and can our exponentially expanding socio-economic universe be sustained, etc, etc? I consider these as integral parts of physics, related to the interface between Reductionism and Complexity, Thermodynamics and Information Theory. The saga will be a personal one ranging from issues connected with the demise of the SSC and attacks on science to the future role of physics and transdisciplinary thinking.