COSAM News Articles 2014 April Department hosts Nobel Prize winning physicist

Department hosts Nobel Prize winning physicist

Published: 04/18/2014

The Littleton-Franklin Lecture in Science and Humanities was held on April 15 and featured Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek, Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and the Office of the Provost. Wilczek’s talk was titled, “Expanding the Doors of Perception: The Physics of Color Vision,” and detailed his work in the area of particle physics. He shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004 for his discovery of the idea of Asymptotic Freedom, which is the notion that the behavior of subatomic particles extremely close to one another is the opposite of their behavior at great distance. His recent book, “The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces,” aims to make Asymptotic Freedom and other central ideas of contemporary physics understandable by a general audience. In addition to the Nobel Prize in physics, he has received numerous awards and honors, including UNESCO’s Paul Dirac Medal, and being named a MacArthur Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow. For more information on Wilczek, click here.