William D. Phillips
Nobel Laureate
NIST

Banquet Speaker
Talk Title: "Time, Einstein, and the Coolest Stuff
in the Universe"

Abstract
What is time? This question intrigued Einstein. In 2005 as the World Year of Physics recalls Einstein's "miraculous year" of 1905, which changed forever our understanding of Nature, we continue to be excited by time and its measurement. Atomic clocks are the most accurate timepieces ever made, and are essential for modern life. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS), which guides aircraft, cars, and hikers to their destinations, depends on atomic clocks and on Einstein's theories. The
limitations of atomic clocks come from the thermal motion of the atoms: hot atoms move rapidly and suffer from time shifts, which are also predicted by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Contrary to intuition, we can cool things by shining laser light on them. With laser cooling, applying ideas that originated with Einstein, we cool gases to less than one millionth of a degree above Absolute Zero. The slowly moving atoms in such a gas allow us to make even more accurate clocks, already so good that they would gain or lose less than a second in 40 million years. Laser cooling has also made possible the observation of a long-standing prediction of Einstein: Bose-Einstein condensation, hailed as one of the most important recent scientific developments, and the coolest thing yet!

This will be a multimedia presentation, suitable for a general audience of children and adults, with live demonstrations and down-to-earth explanations about physics that is literally out of this world.

Biographical Sketch
William D. Phillips received his B.S. from Juniata College (1970) and Ph.D. from MIT (1976). He joined NIST after two years as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He is a NIST Fellow and is a Distinguished professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Phillips is a fellow of the APS, OSA, AAAS, and member of the NAS. He received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal (1993), the Michelson Medal (1996), the APS Schawlow Prize (1998), and was Appointed an Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 2004. In 1997, Dr. Phillips shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

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