Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session R18: Pais Prize /Heineman Prize SessionInvited Live Prize/Award Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: FHP APS Chair: David Cassidy, Hofstra University |
Thursday, March 18, 2021 8:00AM - 8:36AM Live |
R18.00001: Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics (2021): Microscopic Origin of Macroscopic Behavior Invited Speaker: Joel Lebowitz
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Thursday, March 18, 2021 8:36AM - 9:12AM Live |
R18.00002: Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics (2021) Invited Speaker: Hasok Chang While scientists celebrate certain aspects of past science, they disregard other aspects as misguided and not worth remembering. The history of science presented in science textbooks tend to be a picture of past heroes who anticipated modern knowledge, such as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. In my historical work I try to appreciate valuable parts of past science that current scientists do not remember and celebrate. By paying attention to the “losers” in the history of science, we can actually learn much that is scientifically valuable. Through historical work we can recover forgotten ideas and phenomena, and a further examination of such recovered items can even lead to new scientific knowledge. Looking at history with full respect for the past scientists, we can recognize that the scientific common sense of today was once the subject of controversy and exciting cutting-edge research. Going back to early periods of science with this kind of historical perspective can help us regain a sense of fascination in the familiar aspects of nature. Making the science of everyday phenomena come alive can help us instill a love of science in students and the general public. I will substantiate these claims with illustrations from my works on the history of temperature and thermometry (Inventing Temperature, 2004), the basic atomic composition of matter (Is Water H2O?, 2012), and early electrical instruments and theories (How Does a Battery Work?, forthcoming). |
Thursday, March 18, 2021 9:12AM - 9:48AM Live |
R18.00003: Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics (2020): The Hofstadter's butterfly: from playing with numbers to studying quantum materials Invited Speaker: Svetlana Jitomirskaya We discuss some results on the Harper's operator - the model behind the Hofstadter's butterfly: metal-insulator transitions of two kinds, the Ten Martini problem, the proof of Thouless' conjecture from the early 80s: that Hausdorff dimension of the spectrum is bounded by 1/2 for all irrational fluxes, as well as the discovery of self-similar (reflective-)hierarchical structure of eigenfunctions throughout the localization regime. |
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