Brookhaven Lecture

<p>As part of the celebration of Brookhaven Lab's 60th anniversary, Robert P. Crease, the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University and BNL's historian, will present the second of two talks on the Lab's history on Wednesday, December 12.</p> <p>In "Recombinant Science: The Birth of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider," Dr. Crease will focus on the creation of the world's most powerful colliding accelerator for nuclear physics.</p> <p>Known as RHIC, the collider, as Dr. Crease will recount, was formally proposed in 1984, received initial construction funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1991, and started operating in 2000. In 2005, the discovery at RHIC of the world's most perfect liquid, a state of matter that last existed just moments after the Big Bang, was announced, and, since then, this perfect liquid of quarks and gluons has been subject of intense study.</p> <p>After earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1987, Dr. Robert Crease joined the SBU faculty, and, in 1989, he began working part time as BNL's historian. Among his numerous publications on the history and philosophy of science is <i>Making Physics: A History of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946-1972</i> (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Currently, Dr. Crease is working on a sequel, covering the next 25 years of Lab history.</p>