Captain Forrest R. Biard

• Forrest R. Biard was born in Bonham, Texas, and moved to Dallas when he was eleven years old. After graduating from North Dallas High School in 1930, he entered the U.S. naval Academy, graduating 11th in the class of 1933-34.
• He first served on the USS New Orleans, and in 1939 was sent to Tokyo to learn the language and culture of the Japanese people. This education and experience proved invaluable as he became one of twelve men who later deciphered the Japenese code book. The breaking of this code book allowed the U.S. and its Allies to win the Battle of Midway, and eventually to win World War II.
• After World War II ended, Captain Biard attended post-graduate school in Annapolis, Maryland, where he studied nuclear engineering, nuclear physics, and radiation hazards. From there he went on to pursue a master's degree in physics at The Ohio State University (OSU).
• While working on his master's program at OSU, Captain Biard was again called to serve his country as the operations officer for the first hydrogen bomb test. He later returned to OSU and received his master's degree in 1953.
• Captain Biard eventually went back to Japan as captain of the Luzon, a battleship repair vessel. After retiring from the Navy, Captain Biard began teaching physics at Long Beach City College where he taught until his retirement in the 1980s. While at Long Beach City College, he originated an innovative course that used a variety of music tools, including the human voice, to illustrate the physics aspects of acoustics. That class was later filmed and shown on public television.
• Captain Biard's hobbies include reading and discussing physics, including quantum theory, the big bang theory, and astrophysics. He also enjoys reading and translating Japanese history books, particularly those about World War II. Always a sociable person, he enjoys meeting new people and making new friends.
• A Department of Physics Distinguished Alumnus, Captain Biard donated funds to create the R. Jack and Forest Lynn Biard Lectureship in Cosmology and Astrophysics, which is named in honor of his parents.

Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Cosmos: A Blunder Undone

Oct. 17, 2007

• Recent observations of exploding stars located halfway across the Universe reveal an astonishing fact: the expansion of the Universe is speeding up! This suggests that empty space itself is the source of a mysterious "dark energy" that drives cosmic acceleration. Curiously, when Albert Einstein first thought about the role of gravity acting throughout the Universe in 1917, he imagined a repulsive "cosmological constant" that would balance out the attractive effects of gravitation. After the expansion of our Universe was clearly established by astronomers, Einstein regarded this cosmological term as a mistake. Modern observations show that we need something that acts very much like Einstein's discarded cosmological constant to account for an accelerating universe. And we need a lot of it-- dark energy accounts for 70% of the universe today. This talk will show how astronomers use supernova explosions to trace cosmic history and will sketch some of the plans to learn more about the nature of the dark energy through observations.

Professor Robert P. Kirshner

Oct. 17, 2007

• Robert P. Kirshner is Harvard College Professor of Astronomy and Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University. The author of over 200 scientific publications, Kirshner has also written for a broader public in National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, Natural History, and Scientific American magazines and is a frequent public speaker on science. His award-winning popular-level book The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos is now in paperback from Princeton University Press and has been translated into 4 languages.
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  At Harvard, Kirshner teaches a large undergraduate course for students who are not concentrating in the sciences called The Energetic Universe. Kirshner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has just finished a term as President of the American Astronomical Society. In September 2007, Kirshner and his colleagues of the High-Z Supernova Team (including many of his former students and postdocs) shared the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.