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Frontiers in Science Public Lecture
Speaker: Doug Osheroff, Nobel Laureate, Stanford University
Date: Monday, February 13, 2012
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Room 152, AT&T Auditorium
Title: How Advances in Science Are Made
How advances in science are made and how they may come to benefit mankind at large are complex issues. The discoveries that most influence the way we think about nature seldom can be anticipated and frequently the applications for new technologies developed to probe a specific characteristic of nature are not often clear, even to the inventors of these technologies.
One thing is clear, however: seldom are such advances made by individuals alone. Rather, they result from the progress of the scientific community; asking questions, developing new technologies to answer those questions, as well as sharing their results and ideas with others.
There are also research strategies that can substantially increase the probability of one's making a discovery. The speaker will illustrate some of these strategies in the context of a number of well-known discoveries, including the work he did as a graduate student, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996.