Spring 2019 Lederman Lecture "Dream Machines" Featuring Chris Quigg

Particle accelerators and their detectors are the world’s most powerful microscopes. They enable us to inspect the constituents of matter at attometer scales, study matter under unusual conditions, and concentrate extraordinary amounts of energy into tiny volumes to create new forms of matter and initiate new phenomena. The progress of particle physics and of accelerator science and technology go hand in hand. Quigg will look to the past, present, and future, raising questions that we would like to answer about nature along the way.

About the Speaker

Fermilab Theorist Chris Quigg is internationally known for his studies of heavy quarks and cosmic neutrinos, and for his insights into electroweak symmetry breaking and supercollider physics. He has been Visiting Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Cornell University, and Princeton University; Erwin Schrödinger Professor at the University of Vienna; and Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy.

Professor Quigg received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1966 from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society, was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and received an Alexander von Humboldt Award to conduct research in Germany. He shares the 2011 J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society for outstanding achievement in particle theory. The author of a celebrated textbook on particle physics, he edited the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science from 1994 to 2004.

A member of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory staff since 1974, Chris Quigg was for ten years Head of the Laboratory's Theoretical Physics Department. He served as Deputy Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Central Design Group in Berkeley from 1987 to 1989.

Professor Quigg has lectured and written frequently for the general public on the aspirations and achievements of particle physics. He gave the first Carl Sagan Memorial Lecture in the series Cosmos Revisited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He was featured in The Ultimate Particle, a road movie of particle physics broadcast on ARTE in France and Germany.