Bull's-Eye collision between a spiral galaxy and a
smaller intruder sends out a ripple of energy that triggers a firestorm of new starbirth,
forming a dazzling ring-like structure. Bull's-Eye collision between a spiral galaxy and a
smaller intruder sends out a ripple of energy that triggers a firestorm of new starbirth,
forming a dazzling ring-like structure.On April 23, 1996, John Bahcall from the Institute for Advanced Study gave the 1996 Buhl Lecture titled "Recent Discoveries with the Hubble Space Telescope" to a standing-room-only audience in the auditorium of the Mellon Institute. Many members of the Pittsburgh community joined those from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh for the talk and the reception that followed. The audience also included a large turnout of science students from local middle and high schools. The following day Bahcall gave a special Department of Physics Colloquium titled "Solar Neutrinos," a subject where he has made important contributions for three decades. In addition, he was able to meet with a number of the faculty and discuss physics and the developing plans to develop the area of astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon.
This year's Buhl Lecture represents the renewal of a sequence of talks that, in the past, brought famous physicists to the campus to give talks aimed at both a more general audience and a more specialized, scientific one. Fred Gilman, who came to the department this past academic year as Buhl Professor of Theoretical Physics, restarted the Buhl lectureship tradition. These lecturers interact with the faculty and students at Carnegie Mellon and are of great interest to the broader community.
John Bahcall, this year's Buhl Lecturer, got his PhD from Harvard and did much of his early research at Caltech. He moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in the late 60's, where he became not only one of the outstanding astrophysicists in the world, but established a research center in which many other astrophysicists have been trained as students and postdoctoral fellows. During the past two decades he has been involved in the scientific leadership of astronomy and astrophysics. He was awarded NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal for his leadership role in the proposal of the Hubble Space Telescope and in his research with it. At the beginning of this decade he chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences to look at both space- and ground-based astrophysics projects for the next decade, with the resulting "Bahcall Report" serving as a model for setting goals and priorities under restrictive budgetary conditions.
