Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau

discuss

From the Great Wall to the Great Collider:
China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe

This event includes a book signing

Date

Oct
23
Friday
October 23, 2015
3:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store welcomes Contributing Editor to Discover Magazine STEVE NADIS and William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University SHING-TUNG YAU for a discussion of their latest book, From the Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe.

The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson was a sensational triumph—the culmination of a 48-year-long search that put the finishing touches on the so-called “Standard Model” of particle physics. While the celebrations were still underway, researchers in China were making plans to continue the centuries-old quest to identify the fundamental building blocks of nature. More specifically, they began laying the groundwork for a giant accelerator—up to 100 kilometers in circumference—that would transport physics into a previously inaccessible, high-energy realm where a host of new particles, and perhaps a sweeping new symmetry, might be found.

The case for such an instrument is compelling: Even though the Standard Model can describe the behavior of particles with astounding accuracy, it is incomplete. The theory has little to say about the Big Bang, gravity, dark matter, dark energy, and other far-reaching phenomena.

This book explains how an ambitious new machine, on the scale of China’s proposed “Great Collider,” could provide us with a fuller understanding of the origins of our universe and its most basic constituents. 

Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yauthe William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, is the winner of the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize, the Veblen Prize, the Wolf Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Yau has received honorary degrees from ten universities. He has helped establish six mathematical institutes in China and Hong Kong, and the Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard. Yau has written and edited more than twenty books and also edits numerous mathematics journals. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Photo Credit: Susan Gilbert

Steve Nadis
Steve Nadis

Steve Nadis

Steve Nadis, a graduate of Hampshire College, is a contributing editor to Astronomy and Discover. His work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines and in the many books he has written or contributed to. Nadis has served as a staff researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an MIT science journalism fellow, and a consultant to the World Resources Institute, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and WGBH/NOVA. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.

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