The fall season of "Friday Flicks at the PAMS Library" begins at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15, in 211 Davey Lab, inside the Physical and Mathematical Sciences (PAMS) Library, University Park. The full series is listed at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/pams/filmseries.html online.
The schedule follows:
-- Sept. 15: "Napoleon's Wallpaper." How did Napoleon Bonaparte die? Theories abound with poison being a leading contender. Follow chemists and historians as they explore conspiracy theories and surviving historical evidence to solve the mystery. The second film is "Richard Feynman: Take the World from Another Point of View." Part of what made Feynman such a brilliant physicist was his ability to ask questions about everything. This film includes excerpts from several interviews of Feynman and his colleagues.
-- Sept. 22: "The Story of 1: How a Single Digit Created Math and Changed the World." Terry Jones of Monty Python fame takes viewers on an irreverent tour of the history of the number one and its sidekick zero from prehistory to the computer age.
-- Sept. 29: "Understanding the Odds in Life." The statistics of probabilities are examined.
-- Oct. 10: "The Search for Reality: The Story of Quantum Mechanics." Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr strongly disagreed when it came to quantum mechanics. This program traces the history of quantum mechanics and the nature of their disagreement. The second film is "From Stonehenge to Hubble: Looking to the Stars," which takes a short tour of the history of astronomical observation, with an emphasis on the Hubble Space Telescope.
-- Oct. 13: "Clouds are not Spheres: The Fractal Theory of Benoit Mandelbrot." Mandelbrot's life and the development of fractal theory are intertwined. This video traces the history of the man and his theory.
-- Oct. 20: "Albert Einstein and the Theory of Everything." Einstein didn't succeed in finding a theory that would explain everything, but he never gave up trying. This film discusses Einstein's work in this area and his objections to quantum theory.
-- Oct. 27: "A Life of Time: Physics and Chronology" explores perceptions of time. The second film, "Impact! Comets and Asteroids," looks at collisions collisions of comets and asteroids with Earth.
-- Nov. 3: "The Publicity of Oxygen." What did Antoine Lavoisier, Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestly have in common? What was phlogiston anyway? Find out how the eighth element was discovered. The second film is "Home Star: The Sun, the Planets and Mercury."
-- Nov. 10: "The Death Star: Hypernovas and Stellar Nurseries." This program examines how a connection was forged between hypernovas and stellar nurseries through an effort to identify the source of gamma ray bursts.
-- Nov. 17: "Who Found the Missing Link?" Who was Lise Meitner and what was her real role in the discovery of nuclear fission? This program examines her life and groundbreaking work with Max Planck, Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn as well as the obstacles that she faced as a female scientist in a male-dominated profession. The second film is "The History of Computation: Wood, Brass and Baboon Bones." Take a look at computation from mysterious markings on bone fragments, the abacus and sundials, to Babbage engines and logarithms.
-- Dec. 1: "Logic: The Structure of Reason." Mathematics and computer science depend on logic. Follow the development of logic from Aristotle through the works of Boole, Frege, Russell, Gödel, Turing and others.
-- Dec. 8: "Project Poltergeist: The Mystery of Neutrinos." This is a brief introduction to the world of neutrinos from Wolfgang Pauli's theory to huge underground detectors and the nearly 40 yearlong effort to accurately measure neutrinos.
-- Dec. 15: "Topology: Mathematics of the Surface." The film progresses from the four-color theorem to Mobius strips. The second film is "Plunging to a Fiery Death: Last Days of the Galileo Satellite." In 2003 the Galileo satellite finally ended its spectacular career by crashing into Jupiter's atmosphere. This program, originally a ABC News "Nightline" production, traces the history of the Galileo mission.
For more information, call (814) 865-7617.