Brown hosts American Physical Society meeting highlighting research from across New England

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - On Nov. 7 and 8, physicists from across the region will gather at Brown for the annual meeting of the New England Section of the American Physical Society.

For physicists from Brown and elsewhere, the meeting is a chance to exchange ideas and discuss topics that range from superconducting materials to the search for new particles at the Large Hadron Collider to the study of planets in distant solar systems. For students, the conference is a chance to rub elbows with some of the world's top physics researchers as well as peers from other institutions.

For Brad Marston, a physics professor at Brown and president-elect of the American Physical Society, it's also a chance to lay out his vision for leading the nation's largest organization of physics researchers, educators and professionals.

Marston discussed the event in an interview.

Q: Could you talk a little bit about the significance of the conference?

APS is an organization that has 50,000 members organized into about 50 different units, one type of which is a geographical unit, like this New England section. That's the group that's getting together at Brown. What's nice about these geographic group meetings is that they lower the barriers to participation, partly because travel expenses are much lower than other meetings. So particularly right now when funding is constrained and some students might not want to travel via the airline system, this is an important way of getting people together. It's also good for Brown because it gives our graduate school programs - in physics and other departments - some good exposure.

Q: Having all of these great physicists from around the region seems like a great thing for Brown undergraduates, no?

Yes, I think so. But probably even better is that students get a chance to talk to their peers from other schools and share ideas. One of the great things about these meetings is you can discover connections between different areas of science that you weren't aware of beforehand. That's something that has happened to me, and I hope that that happens to them.

Q: Can you tell us about how you made an unexpected connection in your work?

Yes. I've been working on the connections between topology and climate, and also statistical mechanics and climate. This is one of the things I'll be talking about in my keynote. I could have made this connection between topology, fluid dynamics and climate a long time ago if I had been paying closer attention to the geophysical fluid dynamics literature. There's this sort of classic geophysics textbook, which, when I show it to condensed matter physicists, they immediately grasp what it's saying from the quantum context. So if I had seen that, I would have made that connection a lot earlier than I did.

Q: What do you have planned when you take office as APS president next year?

Each president has a theme for their time in office. Mine was going to be climate change and sustainability, but I've decided, in light of how things are going, to broaden it to science and democracy. I want to sort of harken back to the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the American Revolution, and remind people of these ideals. There's a very interesting American scientist, Eunice Newton Foote, who lived in the 19th century. She was a distant descendant of Isaac Newton, and she's the person who first discovered that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation. But she was also a women's rights activist who participated in the famous Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. I'm going to use her example to show that science and democracy are compatible in many ways - like, for example, that science and democracy both depend on careful understanding of facts.