The public lecture, “An Odyssey through our Universe – From the Big Bang and Unknown Dark Forces to Unseen Dimensions and Universes” will be held in the Cartwright Hall Auditorium, Kent Campus, on March 28, starting at 7 PM.  A reception will be held in the Auditorium lobby starting at 6:30 PM.  This event is being held in conjunction with the Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award Ceremony which begins at 5:30 PM and will also be held in the lobby just outside of the Cartwright Hall Auditorium. 

The lecture is intended for a non-technical audience. Children and adults of all ages are encouraged to attend.

“I invite you to take a pedestrian’s guided tour through the genesis of our Universe!” Harris wrote in his abstract for the lecture.  

Harris further explains his planned lecture, “From the Big Bang through initial faster-than-light Inflation of the Universe, watch the universal force of Nature split into 4 forces. Travel through a hot Quark Soup into the regime of particles, atoms and molecules, then to galaxies, solar systems and planets. Along the way, learn “not to exceed the cosmic speed limit” and “to avoid conflicts of cosmic proportions.  In this lecture I will discuss issues that constitute some of the most intriguing mysteries and marvels remaining in modern-day physics, including gravity, black holes, quantum mechanics, string theory, dark matter and the Higgs particle,” he said.

The research interests of Harris are focused on understanding the behavior of nuclear, hadronic and partonic matter at high energy densities. Such energy densities are predicted to have existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang and are expected in collisions of heavy nuclei at ultrarelativistic energies. Formation, discovery and determination of properties of the Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is the primary purpose of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island in New York and at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Harris was involved in the original proposal to initiate a nucleus-nucleus experimental program at CERN to search for a possible QGP phase transition, and has been an active member in the planning, conceptual design, construction, data acquisition and physics of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus experiments NA35 and NA49 at CERN, and the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) experiment at Brookhaven. He was the founding spokesperson for STAR from 1991 until 2002. In addition to his work on STAR, he is currently focusing his research effort on the ALICE experiment at the LHC at CERN and is National Coordinator for the ALICE-USA Collaboration.

Attendance is free and open to the public.

To learn more about this public lecture, please go to: http://www.kent.edu/research/johnharrispubliclecture.cfm

Driving directions and parking instructions

For more information, contact: Jim Maxwell, jmaxwel2@kent.edu