Nobel Laureate to Deliver Inaugural Physics
Department Memorial Lecture in Honor of Norman Kroll

By Kim McDonald I April 18, 2005

Norman Kroll

David Gross, a professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, will speak on "The Future of Physics" in the inaugural lecture of the Physics Department's Memorial Lecture series. The lecture will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, at the Liebow Auditorium in the Basic Science Building.

This annual lecture series is organized in the memory of Norman M. Kroll, a pioneer in quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD physics department. During his 40 year career at the UCSD, Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators. He served as the chair of the physics department from 1963 to 1965 and from 1983 to 1988. See short description of Kroll's life.

David Gross

The lecture series is supported by the financial contributions from the friends and family of Professor Kroll. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is $3.

Gross is director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the first incumbent of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving, in 1973, the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called "the Standard Model" of the quantum mechanical picture of reality and discovered along with his co-recipients how the nucleus of atoms works. This lecture is also a part of the worldwide celebration of 2005 as the year of physics.