Far-out physics is topic

The laws of physics demand that light travel in the straightest possible line. So what happens when light from a distant star passes near a massive object in space like a black hole?

Rather than flying by in a straight line, the light curves.

That's just one of the strange aspects of physics that will be discussed in a free public lecture Wednesday.

Gary T. Horowitz, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss "Strange Views of Space and Time: From Einstein to String Theory" during the Frontiers of Science lecture series Wednesday evening.

The talk, free to the public, begins 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Building, University of Utah.

Among other aspects of physics that seem to defy common sense, according to a U. press release, are:

• The amount of time that passes for you depends on your motion. If you were to rocket toward a distant galaxy at nearly the speed of light (assuming it was possible to go that fast), you would experience little aging while centuries pass back on Earth.

• "Different people can disagree about which things happen at the same time. The notion of two events being simultaneous is not fundamentally well-defined."

Those factors are required by Albert Einstein's theories and are accepted by scientists. What is controversial are far more outlandish-seeming, but possibly true, theories that emerged in recent years.

String theory, developed in an effort to come up with a "theory of everything" that covers all aspects of physics, studies the possibility that the universe has more than the obvious three physical dimensions of height, width and length.

"Horowitz will explain what this means and why it does not conflict with natural observations of our world," says the release. "Some recent speculation about these extra dimensions includes the possibility of parallel universes."

Altogether, five Frontiers of Science presentations are to be offered to the public this academic year, through the efforts of two colleges at the U., the College of Science and the College of Mines and Earth Sciences.