Distinguished Faculty Lecture: John F. Donoghue
Physics professor John F. Donoghue will discuss "Is This the Best of All Possible Universes?" to open this year's Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series.
Donoghue says, "In Candide, Voltaire mocks Pangloss for accepting Leibniz's thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds. But physics may uphold the unfortunate character's view by showing that in most other possible domains life simply could not exist. Physicists are now considering theories
of the 'multiverse,' in which different parts of the universe are physically different by having different properties and values for the constants of nature." Donoghue says his talk is designed to explain why we're looking at physical theories of the multiverse, how they change the search for the fundamental theory, and how difficult it will be-philosophically and practically-to test those ideas.
Donoghue joined the faculty in 1980 and has been a full professor since 1988. He served as head of the Department of Physics from 1996 to 2003. His research looks at theoretical elementary particle physics, including effective field theory, standard model phenomenology, fundamental interactions, and gravity and the early universe. Prior to coming to Amherst, Donoghue was a research associate at Carnegie Mellon University from 1976-78 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1978-80. He was a scientific associate at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland), in 1989-90 and again in the fall of 1999. He is a member of the American Physical Society, division of particles and fields. Donoghue earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Notre Dame in 1972 and his doctorate in Physics from UMass in 1976.
Professor Donoghue will be presented with the Chancellor's Medal at the conclusion of his lecture.
