The Stanford Office for Science Outreach, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and Stanford Continuing Studies join together to invite you, your friends, and family (high school age and up) to campus this summer to experience the wonders of art and science. Come around 5:00 pm and wander through the acclaimed Cantor Museum, then buy dinner and/or drinks at the Museum's Cool Café, and join us at 7:00 pm on lawn chairs outside of Cantor for a fascinating glimpse into the world of scientific research. On five Thursday evenings throughout the summer, Stanford will present lectures from its top researchers on subjects ranging from an environmental success story to the unraveling of mysteries of the human body, the earth, and ancient texts. The lectures will be delivered in lay terms that the general public can understand. Plenty of time will be made available for questions and answers following each talk. Both entrance to the Cantor Museum and the lecture series are free to the public. Several hundred people can be accommodated. An organic buffet BBQ dinner will be available for purchase at the Cool Café in the Museum from 5:00 until 8:00 PM, with both meat and vegetarian options, along with wine, beer, soft drinks, desserts and coffee (cash only).
OUTDOOR SCIENCE TALK 4
Archimedes: Ancient Text Revealed with X-ray Vision
Archimedes (287—212 BC), who is famous for shouting 'Eureka' (I found it), is considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of all times. The 10th-century parchment document known as the “Archimedes Palimpsest” is the unique source for two of the great Greek's treatises. Some of the writings, hidden under gold forgeries, have recently been revealed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. An intense x-ray beam produced in a particle accelerator causes the iron in original ink, which has been partly erased and covered, to send out a fluorescence glow. A detector records the signal and a digital image showing the ancient writings is produced. Please join us in this fascinating journey of a 1,000-year-old parchment from its origin in the Mediterranean city of Constantinople to a particle accelerator in Menlo Park.
UWE BERGMANN - Physicist, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)
Dr. Bergmann's research interests focus on the development and application of novel synchrotron based x-ray techniques (the name given to x-rays or light produced by electrons circulating in a storage ring at nearly the speed of light). These extremely bright x-rays are being used at SLAC to investigate various forms of matter ranging from things at atomic levels to man-made materials with unusual properties, including, in this case, ancient texts!