The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University will host guest speakers Leslie Norris and Dallin S. Durfee during the next two weeks in the library auditorium on the first floor.
Leslie Norris, professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at BYU, will speak to those in attendance as part of the English Reading Series Friday, Jan. 27, at noon.
BYU physics and astronomy professor Dallin S. Durfee will discuss “Splitting and Recombining Atom Waves” as part of the House of Learning Lecture Series Thursday, Feb. 2, at 2 p.m.
Admission to both lectures is free and the public is welcome to attend.
A native of Wales, Norris received the Utah Governor’s Prize in the Humanities in 2004. He has also received many different awards for his poetry from various institutions, including BYU’s Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer in 1990.
Norris has published several collections of poetry, two stories for children and, with professor Alan Keele, translations from the verse of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Durfee will focus his lecture on experimentation and development in the field of “atom interferometry.”
“Everything in the universe is probabilistic,” says Durfee, who specializes in most everything related to the study of atoms and has written numerous papers on the subject of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms. “A particle, or even a person, does not actually exist at a particular location until its position is measured.”
Durfee has also taught and conducted research at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1999.
For more information on the Reading or House of Learning lecture series, visit library.byu.edu or contact Michael Hooper at (801) 422-6687.
Writer: Brian Rust
