The Science behind Arcadia

Join us for a special post-show Sunday Symposium with MIT Professors David Kaiser and Seth Lloyd as we discuss the history behind the science in Arcadia! 

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and also a Professor of Physics at MIT. His books include Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), which received the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society for best book in the field; and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), which was named “Book of the Year” by Physics World magazine and also received the Davis Prize from the History of Science Society for best book aimed at a general audience. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. Other honors include the LeRoy Apker Award from the American Physical Society, and the Edgerton Prize from MIT. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, theNew York Times, and Scientific American, as well as on NOVA television programs, NPR, and the BBC. He is currently writing two books about gravity: a physics textbook with his colleague Alan Guth on gravitation and cosmology, and a history of research on Einstein’s general relativity over the twentieth century.

Dr. Seth Lloyd received a Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University and a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. Since 1988, Dr. Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Lloyd is a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction. Professor Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.