Quantum-mechanical peculiarities? Sign me up!
by Extra.Credit
Ok, I got to this one late, so blog readers will have missed “Imaging a Planet Around Fomalhaut Using the Hubble Space Telescope” but not to worry, there is more from Sonoma State University’s free public lecture series “What Physicists Do.”
Every Monday at 4 p.m. (barring Labor Day) a working physicist will give a talk on a variety of heretofore incomprehensible (to me) topics:
Gibor Basri, professor of Astronomy and Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at the University of California at Berkeley will present the latest results from NASA’s new Kepler space telescope on Oct. 12 and Jonathan Fortney of UC Santa Cruz will discuss super-heated, Jupiter-like planets that orbit close to their parent stars on Nov. 9.
Thomas Devereaux of Stanford, who uses the tools of computational physics to understand quantum materials, will present on Sept. 14 and Per Soderlind of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who studies the quantum-mechanical peculiarities of plutonium, concludes the series on Nov. 23.
For more information on the series, check out http://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/
Extra Credit by Press Democrat education reporter Kerry Benefield is your place for daily school news and conversation. Send items to 
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