[Chaos-l] Meeting February 12th 2008

[Jayme Hanzak]

I just wanted to give everyone the heads-up about our meeting for the month of February.

Our speaker this month is Professor Henry Greenside of the Department of Physics from Duke University. Professor Greenside's talk is "How to Create a Star and Save the Earth". 

Make plans to join us for the February Meeting and learn how to create a star.
If you know any teachers, this sound like a great one to invite them to. 





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           How to Create a Star and Save the Earth

                   Prof. Henry Greenside
          Department of Physics, Duke University
                     hsg at phy.duke.edu

    The human race is approaching a difficult time when there is
    a world-wide growing need for energy, a decreasing
    availability of oil, and increasing political instability
    because oil is owned by just a few countries. Even if oil
    were not scarce and were not owned by a few, the burning of
    fossil fuels is causing a global warming such that ocean
    levels are rising and habitats are changing. In this
    non-technical talk, Prof. Greenside will discuss one of the
    more promising solutions to these energy and environmental
    crises, namely the use of magnetic force fields to create
    stars on Earth that would generate energy the same way our
    Sun produces energy, by the fusion of hydrogen into
    helium. The fusion effort is linked to astronomy in several
    ways: the cosmological origin of deuterium, nucleosynthesis
    in stars, the role of magnetic fields in solar flares, why
    Earth but not Mars has a substantial atmosphere, and whether
    travel to the stars will ever be practical.





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I'll see you there.


Jayme