K.C. Cole: In Conversation with David Politzer

Presented By: Caltech in collaboration with ORIGINS Arts & Ideas Festival

PLEASE NOTE: This event will held in Hameetman Auditorium in Caltech's new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, located at 1216 E. California Blvd.

K.C. Cole, a longtime science writer for the Los Angeles Times and currently with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism, will engage in a wide-ranging discussion of the creation of ideas and the sources of inspiration for the next generation of physicists with Caltech's David Politzer, the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics and Nobel Laureate.

Cole's latest book, "Something Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up," is a memoir/biography of Cole's late mentor, Frank Oppenheimer, the self-proclaimed "uncle" of the atomic bomb and founder of San Francisco's world-renowned "museum of awareness," the Exploratorium.

Cole's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Smithsonian, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, among others. Described by Amazon.com as "the Leonardo da Vinci of science writing," she is the author of eight nonfiction books, including The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty and Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos, based on her Los Angeles Times columns, The Hole in the Universe and First You Build a Cloud.

David Politzer won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for work he began as a graduate student on how the elementary particles known as quarks are bound together to form the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei.

This event is part of the ORIGINS Arts & Ideas Festival, organized by the Pasadena Arts Council. In recognition of this bicentennial Darwin year, the 2009 partners of the Arts & Ideas Festival will interpret the diversity of ORIGINS through music, dance, visual art, architecture, history, science, and theater in a mosaic of cultural activities through the city of Pasadena.