MONDAY, AUGUST 21, 5:30 PM

MMoCA will present ART+ Mass on Monday, August 21 in conjunction with Forward Fest. This event will offer a dialogue on art as a lens and tool for exploring and documenting new discoveries in particle physics. The panel will feature:

• Artist Sonja Thomsen, whose immersive lobby installation at MMoCA is meant to transform a viewer’s encounters with light, space, time, and movement. Thomsen’s interest lies in “creating spaces that highlight the inaccessible. There should always be a place for wonder; it is a direct line to new knowledge.”
• Professor Wesley H. Smith. Bjorn Wiik Professor of Physics at UW-Madison, who has been deeply involved in work on the Large Hedron Collidor used to discover the Higgs Boson particle. The so-called “God particle” is believed to be responsible for giving matter mass and shaping the very early universe.

ART+ website

Astronomers and astrophysicists expect that fast radio bursts (FRBs) happen all the time. Some estimates predict there are up to 10,000 per day. But they are not easy to detect. Telescopes with a wide field of view often don’t have good resolution. And the ones that have good resolution usually come with a much smaller field of view and might be missing them all the time.

FRBs are so short that regular follow-up observations by other radio or optical telescopes are not realistic. This could be a depressing scenario for scientists, but guess what: neutrinos might come to the rescue. 

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