The Faculty of Arts & Science is pleased to present a public lecture with Dr. Arthur B. McDonald (Queen's University). Dr. McDonald is the co-winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics, and will be presented with a doctor of science, honoris causa, at the University of Lethbridge Spring 2019 Convocation I Ceremony.
Join us for a reception and lecture on Thursday, May 30th, 2019 from 2:00-3:30PM in M1040 (Markin Hall). Light refreshments will be served, everyone is welcome.
Dr. McDonald will present his talk, Understanding the Universe from Deep Underground.
By going deep underground and creating ultra-clean detectors it is possible to address some very fundamental questions about our Universe: How does the Sun burn? What are the dark matter particles making up 26% of our Universe? What are the properties of neutrinos, elusive particles that are one of the fundamental building blocks of nature? How do these particles influence how our Universe evolves? With the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) we went 2 km underground to observe new properties of neutrinos that are beyond the Standard Model of Elementary Particles and also confirm that the models of how the Sun burns are very accurate. Through the Global Argon Dark Matter Collaboration, involving the CANFRANC (Spain), Gran Sasso (Italy) and SNOLAB (Canada) underground laboratories and more than 350 international scientists, we hope to push the sensitivity for detecting Dark Matter particles by more than a factor of 100 and perhaps observe a whole new type of matter. All of these topics will be included in a lecture for a general scientific audience.
Arthur B. McDonald
Inspired by a high school math teacher and a first-year instructor at Dalhousie University to pursue the field of physics, Dr. Arthur B. McDonald has produced a litany of fundamentally substantial contributions to science throughout his distinguished career. And while his legacy may well be tied to his discovery that neutrinos do in fact have mass, it is fair to suggest his greatest impact on the field of physics is a work in progress, through the hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows McDonald has mentored.
The discovery fundamentally altered the world’s understanding of the innermost workings of matter and McDonald was named a co-winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. While this important revelation rewrote textbooks and cemented his legacy worldwide, McDonald’s contributions to the study of physics and the successes of his students and collaborators may turn out to be of even greater significance.
Humble, generous of his time and inspiring to the next generation of researchers, McDonald embodies the ideal of accessible scholars, fostering connections within the scientific community and bringing the general public into the scientific world. His commitment to furthering the development of his colleagues and collaborators is unparalleled and promises to advance the science of physics for years to come.