The presentation will briefly cover 1) uses of magnets for medical, physics, and chemistry research, 2) the basics of magnetism, 3) explanation of how to make magnets at home, 4) photos of new and destructively-tested magnets, 5) plans for the Next Generation of World-Record systems!

Dr. Bird’s Ph.D. is in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He has been working at the MagLab for 17 years and has led the development of more than a dozen world record magnets (some of which are in the Guiness Book)!

With over 50 years of experience, our International Programs are second to none. We maintain year-round campuses in London, England; Florence, Italy; Valencia, Spain; and Panama City, Panama. We also offer summer programs in China; Costa Rica; Peru; Czech Republic; France; Ireland; Japan; Russia; and Switzerland. We are always adding new programs and locations; visit http://www.international.fsu.edu/ for the latest offerings. As you will discover, FSU leads the way in global education. The world is our campus!

It was and remains an enormously influential work which The Times Literary Supplement includes on its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western discourse since World War II. British scientist Paul Dirac, who spent the final 14 years of his life and career at Florida State University, was about half way into his tenure as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge when Snow delivered his famous lecture, and one likes to think that he was in the audience.

The division that Snow outlined is, of course, more than a territorial dispute within Universities. What is at stake is the debate over what constitutes knowledge, or who generates knowledge in our culture. In the broader debate, that which filters out from the academy to the general public, the sciences seem to have staked out the territory of knowledge, leaving for the humanities little function beyond discussing its own history, distinguished as that may be, and expressing opinions. That is, to the broader public, studying the humanities, reading novels or examining paintings, produces very little useful or usable knowledge about our world.

In his current talk Professor Gontarski discusses contemporary implications of The Two Cultures and offers an argument for art and literature as a mode of cultural discourse that closes the gap between the two (or more) cultures. The works of the twentieth century’s major literary figures, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, among others, continue to be celebrated not only by literary critics but by scientists, particularly contemporary neuroscientists who see in the work of these writers models or case studies of issues of interest to contemporary scientists in the fields of perception, cognition, and consciousness itself. In fact, artists have been the forerunners in these fields.