VCS is an all-volunteer, non-audition, and inclusive choir. Meaning, we aren’t all musicians all the time. So it’s always fascinating to see what our singers do in their 9-to-5, everyday, off-stage lives.

As it turns out, one of our singers, Phil Rubin – “sort of a bass” (his words) – is a physicist. Specifically, he is associate professor at GMU’s School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences, another example of how often musicians, mathematicians, and scientists tend to overlap.

No doubt you heard something over the summer about this thing called the Higgs Boson, better known to the general non-scientific public as “the God particle.” What is it? And how does one actually pronounce “Higgs-Boson?”

Phil will have some answers when he discusses the Higgs boson in his talk, Wherefrom a Higgs? The story of a Higgs from the Standard Model and a discovery at CERN which looks a bit like it. The event is open to all.

DATE:  Monday, September 17, 2012
TIME:  4:00 p.m.
LOCATION:  Lecture Room (Room 229)
Krasnow Institute Building
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
(Additional directions or information at 703-993-4333 or  http://krasnow.gmu.edu/location/ .)

According to Phil, it isn’t necessary to be a physicist, but it helps if you’ve heard of quarks and know a little bit about what they are. Half of the talk is about CERN, and understanding it needs no science background.