Nature of Light - Conferences

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For our 5th biennial conference in 2013, we want our current and future participants to appreciate that our conference platform will remain as broad as the frequency range of EM waves, from Radio waves to gamma-rays! The key platform is to broaden our understanding of light and matter through all possible light-matter interaction processes. We strongly encourage authors to submit papers that attempt to imagine, visualize and explain the real physical processes behind the generation, propagation and detection of EM waves; thereby energize the debate on whether EM waves consist of indivisible quanta, divisible wave packets, or something new. All submitted theoretical and experimental papers should deal with actual or feasible experiments to prove their points in deference to pure mathematically formalistic papers primarily on quantum philosophy, pure quantum logics.

Special events: (i) Keynote Talk by Carver Mead and (ii) Workshop

1. Keynote talk by Carver Mead:

   Special Technical Event

   Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2013
   Time: 7:30pm, Networking with snacks
   8pm-9pm, Keynote Talk
   9pm-10pm, continued networking with snacks
   
   Chair: Prof. Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri
   
   Presentation by:
   Prof. Carver Mead, Caltech
   
   

   The nature of light:what are photons?

   "It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth century will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics. Early in this period a line was dawn between Classical Physics, containing mechanics, electricity and magnetism and Modern Physics, containing relativity and quantum theory. The connection between the two domains supposed to be Bohr's Correspondence Principle... Physics can indeed be divided into two disciplines: the first preoccupied with the behavior of incoherent systems, and the second concerned with coherent quantum phenomena... I show that electromagnetism falls squarely in the second category."

   - Mead, from Collective Electrodynamics.
   
   Prof. Mead will present his recent views on the nature of light, and how they can be extended seamlessly to a unified view of the observable universe.

2. Workshop: This workshop is designed to prepare ourselves for the next, the sixth biennial conference, to be held during August, 2015. The initial talk(s) are designed to provoke the audience into an open debate that would generate "a variety of food for thought" and triggers ideas for many future scientific papers to be presented in this conference series. The workshop will be opened by C. Roychoudhuri. Names of other selected speakers will be announced later.

   Thursday, Aug. 29, 2013
   10:30am - 12:30pm
   
   

   Theme

   Humans have succeeded in advancing the Global Culture to usher in the Knowledge Age within the last half-century. Innovative engineers have achieved this by developing communication technologies that are based upon generating, manipulating/coding, propagating and then detecting/de-coding signals out of a stream of photons and/or electrons. They never need to solve the Schreodinger's equation, or the Heisenberg's matrix, or ponder on how to manage the wave-particle duality of the photons and the electrons, or even how to manage their non-causal behavior, supposed to be built into the successful QM formalism. Further, no Physicist can claim to fully understand the structure of either the photon or the election! Nano- and bio-technologies have already advanced to the point that humans can start dreaming for living without diseases and then living forever. This increasing rate of technological evolution and consequent progress has been steadily accelerating for millennia without any serious disruptions; while the physics-thinking has been requiring multiple revolutionary disruptions! What is the root cause behind this dichotomy of the innovative engineering-thinking and the physics-thinking?

General call for Papers (CLOSED)

For our 5th biennial conference in 2013, we want our current and future participants to appreciate that our conference platform will remain as broad as the frequency range of EM radiations, from Radio waves to gamma-rays! The key platform is to broaden our understanding of EM radiations and matter through all possible radiation-matter interaction processes. We strongly encourage authors to submit papers that attempt to imagine, visualize and explain the real physical processes behind the generation, propagation and detection of radiations; thereby energize the debate on whether EM waves consist of indivisible quanta, divisible wave packets, or something new. Because radiation and particles are inter-convertible (gamma and electron, positron) and because superposition effects due to EM radiation and particle beams are remarkably similar, this conference encourages papers on particles that attempt to illuminate the common nature of radiation and particles. While epistemological papers elucidating the approaches to understanding the interaction processes behind natural phenomena are very welcomed; all submitted theoretical and proposed-experimental papers should deal with actual or feasible experiments to prove their points in deference to pure mathematical formalism, pure philosophy or un-performable "gedanken experiments".