2009 Kavli Futures Symposium
Envisioning the Extreme Machine

Computers are the workhorses of science. Without their power to crunch numbers, control instruments, turn raw data into intelligible patterns or pictures and test theories with simulations, most of what we now know about ourselves and the universe might still be a mystery. But computing technology as we know it is reaching its limits, even as scientists look forward to new discoveries that are possible only with a great leap in computing power.

How can computing make that leap? That was the subject of the 2009 Kavli Futures Symposium, "Real Problems for Imagined Computers," a meeting of minds between leading computer experts and scientists in disciplines such as cosmology and neuroscience that use computers to process huge quantities of data. "Computing is something important that we have in common," says lead organizer Roger Blandford, head of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. Full story.

Now that environmental scientists have a good understanding of why our climate's changing, how can they help us prepare for a warming world?

This is the question posed by Michael Prather, Fred Kavli Chair and Professor of Earth Science at the University of California, Irvine. A leader in the field, Prather wants scientists to do more than find the root causes of climate change. He hopes they can apply the same rigor used successfully in identifying the physical, chemical and biological factors behind climate change to understanding how people interact with the climate. To do this, he envisions traditional researchers taking a more holistic approach to their work by teaming with colleagues who specialize in fields such as sociology, demographics, economics, political science and the humanities. Full story.

To get to the South Pole, first take a commercial flight to Christchurch, New Zealand, then catch a special military flight to McMurdo Station, a large outpost on the Antarctic coast. From there it's a three-hour flight to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

"When I landed, I saw this completely blue, almost dark sky because the atmosphere is so transparent there," recalled Chao-Lin Kuo of his first trip in 2000. Kuo is an astrophysicist with Stanford University's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. The dry, rarified air of the South Pole is ideal for the instruments he and his collaborators use to collect ancient photons. This light tells the story of the origin of the universe. It is all around, but invisible to the human eye.  Full story.

A tiny fraction of a second following the big bang, the universe allegedly experienced the most inflationary period it has ever known. During this inflationary era, space expanded faster than the speed of light. It sounds crazy, but it fits a variety of cosmological observations made in recent years, said Bruce Winstein, physicist at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the  University of Chicago.

"Theorists take it to be true, but we have to prove it," said Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. "It needs a real test, and that test is whether or not gravity waves were created."

Winstein and his Chicago associates are part of the international QUIET (Q/U Imaging ExperimenT; the Q and U stand for radiation parameters called Stokes parameters) collaboration that has devised such a test. QUIET's goal: detect remnants of the radiation emitted at the earliest moments of the universe, when gravity waves rippled through the very fabric of space-time itself. Full story.

Physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a nanoscale device that can be used for force detection, optical communication, and more. The device exploits the mechanical properties of light to create an optomechanical cavity in which interactions between light and motion are greatly strengthened and enhanced. These interactions, notes Oskar Painter, associate professor of applied physics at Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute and principal investigator on the research, are the largest demonstrated to date.

The device and the work that led to it are described in a recent issue of the journal Nature. Full story.