Physicists Return for Katzenstein Lecture

Prof. William Stwalley, left, and 1996 Nobel Laureate in physics David Lee (55 MS, physics), right, visit Prof. Edward Eyler's laboratory before the Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture.

Frank Wilczek, a 2004 Nobel Prize co-winner in physics and one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, delivered his view that "the universe is a strange place" in the Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture in September, part of the Physics Department's Einstein Centennial Colloquium Series.

Attending the lecture were several UConn alumni who earned master's degrees in physics here in the mid 1950s when the late Henry S. Katzenstein was a physics graduate student.

Katzenstein earned the first Ph.D. in physics at UConn in 1954. During his career his work led to a patent for reading information from compact discs, and he co-founded the Brooktree Corp., a California semiconductor company.

In 1996, he established an endowment that funds the annual lecture and a prize in his name.

Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, won the Nobel Prize last fall, along with David J. Gross of the University of California at Santa Barbara and H. David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology, for discovering asymptotic freedom.

This describes the paradox that quarks, the most basic building blocks of matter, smaller even than protons and neutrons, have a weak attraction when they are close to each other but become more strongly attracted to each other the farther away they are.

"The work that he did was very important in terms of what is called the Standard Model of physics," said William C. Stwalley, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and head of the physics department. The Standard Model explains current thinking in high energy physics about elementary particles.

You can't see quarks, Wilczek pointed out as he showed a slide demonstrating the movement patterns of a quark, an anti-quark, and a gluon.

Gluons, particles that help hold quarks together, have zero mass, Wilczek noted, and quarks have a mass that is not quite zero but is much less than protons.

"We have produced the feat of creating mass from no mass," he said, one of the many paradoxes in contemporary physics theory.

"Because of the possibility of getting mass out of energy, it's not odd that we have protons and neutrons out of essentially mass-less building blocks," he said.

Ninety-five percent of the universe is composed of "dark stuff that we don't know much about," Wilczek noted: 25 percent is dark matter, which is actually invisible, and 70 percent is dark energy, which is also invisible. He called this "the strange universe emerging at unknown parts of physics."

"Our current concepts of physics will be tested in coming years," he said. "You'll have to learn different things, and in some ways, they're more abstract, but we haven't reached yet the limits of human understanding," he predicted.

Among the physics alumni who attended the lecture were earned David Lee, now a professor at Cornell University and the 1996 Nobel Prize winner in physics, John Reppy, who recently retired from the Cornell physics department, and Michael Zatzick, who later earned a Ph.D. at Brown University. Lee was the first Katzenstein lecturer in 1997.

Reppy earned his bachelor's degree in 1954 in math and switched to physics for his master's in 1956 after working with Katzenstein.. "It was a wonderful time," he recalled.

Zatsick said that he, Katzenstein, and former faculty member Stephen S. Friedland built Polaroid Corp.'s first mass spectrometer.

Lee described Katzenstein as "smarter than almost anybody I've ever met. We were good friends who talked about physics."