November 29, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will give a Five College “What's New in Physics” talk on the topic “Does the Everyday World Obey Quantum Mechanics,” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 1, in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Departments of Physics at the Five Colleges and with the support of Five Colleges, Inc., Leggett's talk is free and open to the public.
A pioneer in the field of superfluidity, Leggett received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003 for his research in the theory of low-temperature physics. Leggett's work has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and other strongly coupled superfluids, set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leggett is also a Fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. Leggett is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.) and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 “for services to physics.”
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