Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 23, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Gino Segre

"A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of our Species, Planet, and Universe "

ABSTRACT -- The colloquium is based on a book published in July 2002 by Viking Press and in the U.K. in February 2003 by Penguin. There it carried the title Einstein's Refrigerator - The Ups and Downs of Temperature. As is clear, at least from the US title, the book discusses many topics ranging from body temperature in humans to global warming and superconductivity. Seemingly unrelated, this wide menu is connected using temperature as a guide. So far the book has been reviewed very favorably in major US newspapers including the NY Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post. In addition, the Book of the Month Club has purchased it for its Science Library.

SPEAKER -- Gino Segre was born in Florence, Italy. He received his education at Harvard (A.B. 1959) and MIT (PhD 1963). This was followed by two years of research in Geneva (European Center for Nuclear Research-CERN) and two more years at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to the University of Pennsylvania where he has been Department Chairman for five years, Director of Theoretical Physics at the National Science Foundation for one year, and has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, as well as grants from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. He has written approximately 100 papers in theoretical physics and astrophysics, with the most recent work being on neutrino emission from supernovae.