What Can Scientists Learn From Artists?
- Speaker
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Stephon Alexander, Ph.D.Brown University
IDEA Scholar, 2020-2021, Flatiron Institute
Like a musical composition, physicist Stephon Alexander will present a four-part movement, each containing a vignette of experiences he had interacting and collaborating with artists and musicians (such as Will Calhoun, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Melvin Gibbs, Rosemary Goodell, Justin Guariglia, Ned Kahn and Arto Lindsay) and how those interactions influenced his scientific ideas, research, approach and creativity.
WEBINAR SCHEDULE
3:45 – 4:00 pm ET Webinar waiting room opens
4:00 – 5:00 pm ET Talk + Q&A
Registration is required for this free event.
Further instructions and access to join the webinar will be sent to all registrants upon sign up.
Inquiries: [email protected]
About the Speaker
Physicist, musician and author Stephon Alexander has straddled the worlds of theoretical physics and jazz music over the last two decades. He works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the Big Bang with subatomic phenomena.
Alexander is a professor of physics at Brown University and president of the National Society of Black Physicists. He previously held appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College London, Penn State, Dartmouth College and Haverford College. He is a senior fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows and a visiting scholar and Diversity, Equity & Advocacy (IDEA) scholar at the Flatiron Institute.
Alexander is a specialist in the field of string cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of inflation based on higher dimensional hypersurfaces in string theory called D-branes. In such models, the early universe emerged from the destruction of a higher dimensional D-brane which ignites a period of rapid expansion of space often referred to as cosmic inflation.