VIU ElderCollege presents Space and Time: Beyond Flatland

VIU ElderCollege presents Space and Time: Beyond Flatland part of our Spring 2023 Saturday Speaker Series Space And Beyond… Concepts of space and time put forward since the beginning of the 20thCentury.

Admission Fee: $15.00 per presentation
Time: 10:00 am to Noon
Online Location: Zoom
In-person Location: Parksville Campus (Maximum capacity 50)
*Register on Eventbrite

Presenter:
Joaquin Bohigas Bosch, a recently retired professional astronomer, has been involved in research, teaching, and outreach activities for the past 40 years.

About The Talk:
During the first half of the twentieth century, concepts of space and time were radically changed by Quantum Mechanics along with the Special and General Theories of Relativity. In daily experience, the physical universe is an ordered, predictable, rigid three-dimensional world where parallel lines never meet, where space and time are continuous and can be measured with absolute precision, where clocks run at the same rhythm, where messages are sent from wherever we are, and where there is clear distinction between past and future, cause, effect, and simultaneity. These impressions are a consequence of the particular conditions of our physical environment. Most do not realize that space is curved and each clock runs at a different rhythm because the earth’s mass is too small to bend space-time. We move so slow that we don’t notice that the measurements of time and space depend on how fast we go. We are so big that we cannot see that the world is inherently uncertain, that, among other things, there is a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which we can measure at the same time the position and the velocity of a particle. For the same reason, we still discuss whether space and time are continuous or whether there is a basic unit for both.

Biography:
Joaquín Bohigas Bosch is an astronomer trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the University of Oxford. He has been a researcher at the UNAM’s Institute of Astronomy for the past forty years, almost always in the city of Ensenada, Mexico. Most of his activities have been directly related to investigating different manifestations of the interstellar medium, but he has also dedicated part of his time presiding over and developing instrumentation for the National Astronomical Observatory in the Sierra de San Pedro Martir, Baja California.