The Walker L. Cisler Memorial Lecture Series Presents...

"Picture Perfect: Persuasion, Politics and Prejudice surrounding the scientific image, 1800 - 2009"

Speaker Dr. Eric J. Heller
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Lear Auditorium

Over the years, some physical scientists and mathematicians have eschewed diagrams, declaring them as unnecessary crutches for weaker minds. They preferred formal mathematical argument.   In recent years, computers have made possible images of stunning clarity and pedagogy, winning over most (but not all) skeptics, and a great following among students and the public.  Does the use of imagery amount to dumbing down the discipline?  Is there such a thing as proof by image alone?  Are iconic images good for science? A thread through the science of classical and quantum waves leads us through the prejudices, successes and failures of the scientific image from 1800 to the present day.

Biography

Eric J. Heller was born in Washington D.C. in 1946.  He received his BS from the University of Minnesota in 1968, and his PhD in Chemical Physics in 1973 from Harvard University, where he worked with William Reinhardt.  After a postdoc at the University of Chicago with Stuart Rice, Heller went to UCLA in 1975 where he rapidly rose through the ranks to become Professor.  In 1981 he took a sabbatical at Los Alamos National Laboratory, ultimately joining LANL as a staff scientist until 1984 when he accepted a faculty position in chemistry at the University of Washington.  In 1993, Heller returned to Harvard as Professor of Physics, and assumed his present position of Professor of Physics and Chemistry in 1998. 

Heller has made groundbreaking theoretical contributions in quantum dynamics, spectroscopy, semiclassical approximations, and condensed matter physics.  He is perhaps best known for his seminal work on the time-domain wavepacket approach to molecular spectroscopy, and on the quantum mechanics of classically chaotic systems.  More recently Heller has used his deep understanding of quantum mechanics to explain fascinating coherence effects in quantum corrals and quantum dots, as well as the beautiful "branched and fringed electron flow" in semiconductor heterostructures, discovered experimentally by Bob Westervelt's group at Harvard.

Heller was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and received the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry in 2005.  He received the Astor Fellowship at Oxford in 2005 and was the 2003 recipient of the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize.  Heller has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society, as well as a Sloan Fellow, a Humboldt Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.  He has delivered many named lectures, and authored over 225 publications.