Young Scholar Club will be organizing the National Astronomy Olympiad in order to prepare the Iran national team to participate in the 10th International Astronomy Olympiad which will be held in China in Sep 2005. In the last two years, teams from National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET) have participated in the International Astronomy Olympiad. This year, it has been decided that the team selection will be done in the national level by the Young Scholar Club which is in charge of organizing other national olympiads.
The picture in the right shows the Nodet team in the Internation Astronomy Olympiad in 2004.

To read more about it, click here.

In the upcoming APS march meeting which is happening on March 21-25 in Los Angeles, there will be a talk titled Human Rights in Iran after the 1978 Islamic Revolution. The talk which will be presented by Dr. Hadi Hadizadeh from Ohio University is in a session with the subject of The Physics Community’s Defense of Human Rights. The talk is an invited talk.

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Caltech’s Information Science and Technology

Ali Hajimiri, an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and his team have used revolutionary design techniques to build the world’s first radar on a chip–specifically, they have implemented a novel antenna array system on a single, silicon chip..

Such a built-in radar system in our cars has long been in the domain of science fiction, as well as wishful thinking on the part of commuters. But such gadgets could become available in the very near future, thanks to the High Speed Integrated Circuits group at the California Institute of Technology.

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New York University planned to mark the anniversary of Einstein’s birthday by bringing Einstein look-alikes together. They only found one person: Mr Rashidzada from Afghanistan.

Read the rest at BBC’s website.

The opening ceremony of The World Year of Physics in Iran was held on March 10 in Vahdat auditorium in Tehran. In this ceremony, speaker of the parliment, several cabinet ministers, university academics and many others attended.

The World Year of Physics 2005 is a United Nations endorsed, international celebration of physics. Events throughout the year will highlight the vitality of physics and its importance in the coming millennium, and will commemorate the pioneering contributions of Albert Einstein in 1905. The government of Iran has also named the year 1384 in Iranian calender The Year of Physics after the suggestion made by the physical society of Iran.

News source : ISNA

Anne-Laure Biolley & Shahriar Zayyani
Shahrvand, No. 961, February 08, 2005

Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran in 1960. He attended the prestigious Alborz High School, before going to the US in 1977 as an undergraduate at MIT, where he got his bachelor’s degree in math and physics, as a double major. He then went on to Princeton University for graduate work, where he got his PhD in Physics, in 1985. He then became a junior fellow at Harvard, where he later got a junior faculty position. In 1989 he was offered a senior faculty position, and he has been there ever since.
Professor Vafa, is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is one of the main initiators and one of the leaders of research in String Theory - one of the leading physics theories for describing the interactions and forces of nature.

When did you decide to become a physicist and why?

Well, I was interested in physics, but I was not considering it as a profession when I was in Iran. After I came to study in the US, in my freshman year, I really liked physics and math, much much more than the rest of the courses I was taking. But I was still not reconciled with the idea of doing it as a job. The idea of majoring in science, at the time, was foreign to our culture. So after a bit of consideration – my parents were a great help, they never pushed me in anyone direction or another, so thanks to their openness – I was allowed to choose the direction I was interested in. So I ended up in physics and math.

To read the rest of the interview click here

In search of hidden dimensions

Nature 433, 10 (06 January 2005)

So far, string theory has defied experiments, but Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks he has found a way to put the idea to the test. Geoff Brumfiel finds out how.

Ask most theorists when they think their calculations will be tested experimentally and you’ll be told “decades” or sometimes, more honestly, “never”.

But ask Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at Harvard University, and he will give you a far closer date: 2008. That is when the first results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, are expected to be released by CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. And if Arkani-Hamed’s predictions are correct, then that is when an experiment will detect the first evidence to support string theory ‚Äî a vision of the cosmos that has never been verified experimentally. “The field is going to turn on what happens at the collider,” he says.

Pacing his sparse Harvard office, the 32-year-old physicist drinks no less than six cups of espresso during our hour-and-a-half interview, as he tries to explain why he thinks string theory can now be tested.

To read the rest of the article click here

Physics subgroup is the first subgroup created by our group. We would like to encourage interactions among Iranian physicists who are living inside or outside Iran. This page will include news on hot topics in Physics, links to achievements of Iranian physicists, and notice of upcoming conferences.

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We are launching subgroups for scientific divisions (physics, math, computer science,…). On our website, we will have pages dedicated to these subgroups. These pages will include the news on recent achievements in those fields, success of Iranian scientists, and upcoming conferences.

For now, we only have created Physics subgroup to learn more how we have to structure the subgroups. Here is the link to the physics page.