Thursday, November 22, 2007
PUBLIC lecture on 16th November 2007
The Berkeley Club of Singapore will be hosting a public lecture event, featuring the University of California, Berkeley's esteemed Nobel Laureate, Dr George Smoot III... Lynn, our logistic for practical astronomy went and here is her report...
Mooey: Are we lost?
(wandering aimlessly outside Oriental Hotel)
Lynn: …
Mooey: Wo you yi dian bei pian de gan jue... (I feel like I have been cheated a little…)
Lynn: This is where the fun begins…
Both Mooey and I started scrambling high and low for Ritz Carlton Hotel to attend the much anticipated seminar held by guest speaker Dr. George Smoot, invited by the Berkeley Club of Singapore. A Nobel Laureate in Physics and an active researcher in Astrophysics and Cosmology, Dr. Smoot is no doubt one of the elites in his field. Don’t play play.
After getting directions to the exact location from Oriental, we went back to Marina Square shopping mall and Mooey soon vanished into thin air. Strange. He re-emerged again, looking dazed this time. Giddy? Can’t be. Apparently, he was looking for Henry (an ex-NP astro guy) who was also joining us for the seminar.
Henry soon caught up with us when we were about to leave, so three of us set off for the crazy hunt of Ritz. And it’s already 6.05 pm (the seminar begins at 6pm)!! Mooey was complaining that by the time we reach, we will only get to hear the ending speech. Touchwood!
It was total madness and a real roller coaster ride all the way to Ritz. And did I mention about having a map with me? Well…now you do. Geographical maps are plain useless when you are lost in an underground shopping centre, trust me. Been there, experienced it. After following more directions and keeping towards the right, much to our relief we finally found Ritz Carlton! Woohoooo! Ok, I should hold back my excitement.
Thinking our ordeal is over, we headed straight for Ballroom 1 and took a lift to Level 1. There, the place looked rather obscured, and there was no ‘Dr. George Smoot’ signboard or any signs of an ongoing astronomy talk there.
Mooey: Are we at the right place? Doesn’t look right to me.
Lynn: …
Henry: Huh? Don’t tell me we came to the wrong place again?
Caught in the middle of two evils, I approached the lady receptionist there to clarify.
Lynn: D&^%! The seminar is at Level 2?? Then why the h**k is the venue listed as Ballroom 1? And why are there no ballrooms listed on Level 2 in the lift? #@%$@!*^%#*@!%
(grumbles to self)
Mooey: Yeah, why is the Ballroom at Level 2?
Lynn: I know why… Maybe…The first programme of the evening is to have dinner here before moving up.
(turns away from the receptionist and walks towards the lift grumbling)
Henry: LOL!
Mooey: Lynn gou4 le3 gou4 le3...! (Enough is enough!) You are making me hungry!
(raises voice a little)
With precious minutes ticking by, we finally found the venue! It was about 6.15pm when we reached.
Part 2: The Seminar
To begin with, here’s a short summary of the seminar in 3 words: Insightful, Complex, Oversimplified.
Basically, the seminar covered topics ranging from the Big Bang theory, Fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, Temperature anisotropy, the COBE DMR project, D2F project, large scale structure of the universe, Dark energy, scientific progression of Cosmology through various extensive projects which include upcoming Planck project, and various programme simulations of determining the structure of the universe. Simply put, it’s almost a freaking whole complete PhD course in Cosmology squashed into a minuscule version of a one-hour seminar. Twice, Dr. George Smoot was told to conclude his talk as he had exceeded an hour.
Scratching only the surface of the deepest topics in Cosmology, you will be left dumbfounded if you aren’t an avid follower of the subject. His strong American accent doesn’t help much either. With some bit of luck, I was able to recover some minute cosmology relics stored away in my puny mind and fit the bits and pieces together to arrive at some decent understanding of what the speaker is trying to bring across.
With only compliments for his talk, it was definitely an enriching and stimulating experience. During the seminar, Dr. Smoot also showed us a presentation slide with a photo of him and his team members all spread out on a snow field posing the letters “M-e-r-r-y C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s ♥”. It was meant to be a Christmas card for their families back home as they had to be away in Antarctica assembling their radio telescope dish to precisely map the microwave radiation from our Milky Way galaxy. I still remembered that the letter ‘Y’ in ‘Merry’ was posed by a person with his legs split opened. Very creative indeed.
In fact, throughout the whole seminar (ok, maybe not the whole thing as we were initially somewhere at Oriental) not one bit of mathematical formula was being discussed. It wasn’t even about the theoretical calculations or hardcore Cosmology in its finer details. Rather, Dr. Smoot was more into what he has accomplished from his COBE project and his findings which eventually led him into discovering the anisotropy in background radiation temperature that later provided as a strong observation support for the Big Bang theory. And that’s the tricky part. If we don’t know s*** about cosmology or even about the COBE project itself, we would perceive him to be speaking in Greek!
Making up most of the audience were working adults in their tuxedos and night gowns (ok, maybe not tuxedos but dark suits. J ). Of course, there were students too in their uniforms, but that’s only a small minority.
Surprisingly, only two questions were asked during the Q&A session as it took Dr. Smoot approximately 5 mins to answer each one before we had to be dismissed. It was very clear from the way he tackled the ‘profound questions’ that he had a whole mass of knowledge locked in up there, and from just these two questions alone, I got to learn a lot more about how the large scale galactic structures form, the reason behind their formations, and about how dark matter, dark energy might relate to these formations. Somehow, it feels like a whole new level of being ‘Einsteinian’, having a bigger head, and attaining Nirvana.
On the whole, I think it’s a seminar well-worth the rush-in. Every minute of it counts, right to the very last.
Reported by Lynn Koh
*clap*clap*
posted at 11:00 PM
