Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
- Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
- Technological change and the global energy system
- Time: 12:05 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Gregory Nemet, La Follette School of Public Affairs
- Abstract: Meaningfully addressing the large scale challenges associated with the way we use and consume energy -- including security of supply, air pollution, and climate change -- will require transformation of the global energy system. Designing policies to encourage this change in societally beneficial directions is plagued by an array of uncertainties. In particular, attempts to model optimal policy design reach vastly different normative conclusions depending on assumptions about the expected rate of technical change and the extent to which government actions can affect it. Empirical work on parameterizing technical change is plagued by concerns about the inherent stochasticity of the process of innovation and the idiosyncrasies of individual technologies. Still, the search for useful models of technological change continues. This talk presents recent efforts to model the process of technological change in low-carbon energy technologies.
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Dark Matter Substructure in the Milky Way
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 6515 Sterling Hall
- Speaker: Mike Kuhlen, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
- Abstract: It is a clear unique prediction of the cold dark matter paradigm of cosmological structure formation that galaxies form hierarchically and are embedded in massive, extended dark halos teeming with self-bound substructure or "subhalos". The amount and spatial distribution of subhalos around their host provide unique information and clues on the galaxy assembly process and the nature of the dark matter. I will present results from the "Via Lactea" simulations of Galactic CDM substructure, focusing in particular on the possibility of directly observing it through the detection of gamma-rays from DM annihilations in the centers of subhalos.