A Public Lecture Offered by the Prairie Particle Physics Institute

Speaker:
Alex R. Dzierba
Chancellor’s Professor of Physics Emeritus
Indiana University – Bloomington, Indiana

Concerns about climate change, global warming, depleting fossil fuels, our uncertain reliance on energy resources from politically unstable countries and our overall energy security require us to look for other sources of sustainable energy and re-examine how we use energy. Sustainable energy is now a major concern for all of us. The United Nations report from the World Commission on Environment and Development defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In planning strategies to use energy more efficiently and to develop and use alternative sources of energy, it is essential to quantify how we use energy, and how the basic laws of physics constrain what we realistically can and cannot do. This talk will focus on quantifying and simple calculations, using numbers, not just adjectives, as we consider conservation strategies and renewable and alternative energy sources (e.g. solar, wind, biofuels and hydro).

About the speaker:

Alex Dzierba received his Ph.D. in experimental particle physics at the University of Notre Dame and had a four-year Research Fellow appointment at the California Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at Indiana University in 1973. He taught physics and did research at Indiana University until he retired in 2008. He held a one-year appointment as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, another one-year appointment as a Scientific Associate at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) and a two-year appointment as Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. He was the founding project leader for the GlueX project at Jefferson Lab, to search for exotic mesons. He also served on the board of examiners for the GRE Physics Exam for eight years. He has co-authored over 100 articles in referred journals. He currently works as a physicist for EG&G, a division of URS, in support of the US Navy on energy issues. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of IEEE, a member of the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) and a member of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

Download the poster for this presentation.