Presented by Bell Museum of Natural History
The Bell Museum's Café Scientifique is a happy hour exchange of ideas about science, environment, and popular culture featuring experts from a variety of fields on diverse and often provocative topics.
Topic: Einstein for Everyone
UMN Professor and theoretical physicist Michel Janssen has long been interested in making the results of his research on the history of modern physics accessible to a broader audience. Based on his perennially popular seminar, Einstein for Everyone, Prof. Janssen promises to illuminate in layperson’s terms “Einstein’s struggle to find satisfactory gravitational field equations in his quest to eliminate absolute motion and absolute space(-time) from physics”…and, more importantly, to explain why it matters.
Prof. Michel Janssen is faculty in the graduate Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the School of Physics and Astronomy, and the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburg in 1995 in the History and Philosophy of Science, with his dissertation: “A Comparison between Lorentz’s Ether Theory and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in the Light of the Experiments of Trouton and Noble.” Prof. Janssen’s research in general is guided by broader philosophical questions about scientific methodology and scientific explanation, with a keen interest in making his work accessible to larger audiences.
Details:
Tuesday, October 21 at 7:00 p.m. (doors 6:00) $5 - $12 sliding scale