January 12, 2024
Colloquium Topic: Falling Felines & Fundamental Physics
The question of how falling cats land on their feet has long intrigued humans. In this playful and eye‑opening history, physicist and cat parent Gregory Gbur explores how attempts to understand the cat‑righting reflex have provided crucial insights into puzzles in mathematics, geophysics, neuroscience, and human space exploration.
The result is an engaging tumble through physics, physiology, photography, and robotics to uncover, through scientific debate, the secret of the acrobatic performance known as cat‑turning, the cat flip, and the cat twist. Readers learn the solution but also discover that the finer details still inspire heated arguments. As with other cat behavior, the more we investigate, the more surprises we discover.
Colloquium Speaker: Greg Gbur
Greg Gbur is an American author and physicist who specializes in the study of classical coherence theory in optical physics. He is a full professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Department of Physics and Optical Science.
Gbur got his B.A. in physics from the University of Chicago, his M.A. in physics from the University of Rochester, and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.
Gbur does research on the merging of singular optics with optical coherence theory. This work is aimed at improving free-space optical communications. He has also been very active in the study of optical invisibility and invisibility cloaks. He has recently applied the techniques of singular optics towards the design of superoscillatory waves for high-resolution imaging.
In September 2020, The Optical Society elected Gbur a Fellow, in recognition of "contributions to coherence theory, singular optics, and the intersection of these disciplines".
Gbur maintains an active interest in the history of science. He founded and co-moderated a blog carnival, The Giant's Shoulders, which focused on the history of science and ran from 2008 to 2014. He maintains a popular science weblog, Skulls in the Stars, that seeks to elucidate science and its history for the public. Two of his blog posts have been included in "best of online science" books. He has contributed to Science Blogging: The Essential Guide. He has written popular articles for a number of magazines, including La Recherche, American Scientist, and Optics and Photonics News.