 Please be seated. It is my distinct honor as president of Gustavus Adolphus College to welcome you to this, the 49th Nobel Conference at Gustavus. As we officially open the conference, I would like to introduce one of the college's chaplains, Reverend Ciri Erickson, for the invocation. But before I do so, I would like Chaplain Ciri to stand along with Chaplain Brian Conkel. We have two new chaplains. This is quite a tradition at the Nobel Conference. In fact, the first director of the Nobel Conference was Chaplain Elvie. And what a pleasure it is to welcome these two new chaplains to this great institution. Chaplain Ciri is a graduate of Carlton College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and majored in chemistry. She received her master of Divinity degree from the Claremont School of Theology. And before coming to Gustavus, Reverend Erickson served as pastor for lifelong learning at Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater. Chaplain Brian is a graduate of Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. And he graduated from Luther Seminary and has served on two different occasions as a missionary, first in South America and then for seven years in South Africa. Most recently, he served as a parish pastor in Madison, Wisconsin. We welcome both of you. Chaplain Ciri, would you please join me at the podium as we welcome you? Let us join our hearts and our minds together in a moment of gratitude. Compassionate and creative God, we give thanks for the beauty and magnificence of this universe and for our human capacity to explore its deepest mysteries. As we journey together in an epic adventure of truth seeking, may we be challenged to expand our vision of the world. May we be dazzled by the wonders of scientific knowledge and may we remain curious and open to a future of continued discovery. With gratitude for the scientists who are presenting at this conference, for their passionate pursuit of knowledge about the universe and for their dedication to teaching and learning, we pray today with full hearts. Amen. Thank you, Chaplain Ciri. This year's Nobel conference theme, the universe at its limits is, I believe, especially illustrative of the college's commitment and the commitment of our faculty to tackle cutting-edge topics from an interdisciplinary perspective and explore their philosophical and their theological implications. This year's theme and focus has generated tremendous excitement in an unusually high demand for tickets, as well as a significant interest on the web streaming of the conference. On Sunday evening, we had the largest attendance ever for the preview dinner and lecture done by Dr. James Gates, held at the Science Museum of Minnesota to introduce the conference to the business leaders, the non-profit executives, educational leaders, and media representatives, and our alumni and friends in Minneapolis and in St. Paul. Gustavus' annual national Nobel conference was the first educational conference of its kind in the United States and continues to be the only such conference of its magnitude at an undergraduate liberal arts college today. This year's conference marks the fourth year of a very special year-long outreach program for high school students and teachers throughout the state of Minnesota. The program was first funded through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and this year it is funded by the Catherine B. Anderson Fund of the St. Paul Foundation. We are taking advantage of this year's conference topic to enhance high school senior curriculum in the state and to better prepare participating teachers and their students for the conference. Engaging high school students and teachers has long been a hallmark of the conference. Of the over 5,000 individuals who will attend the two-day conference here in St. Peter, approximately 1,700 will be here from high schools all over the region, Minnesota and contiguous states. This year we have eight teachers from eight different high schools in this program in the Minnesota program that we have and many of those students are attending the Nobel conference today and others are joining us tomorrow as well as many other students from all over the state. I want to direct your attention to the students here. I believe they're seated in the balcony area and I'd like to add them stand so that we can welcome them to this their first Nobel conference. Would you please stand? As we approach the 50th Nobel conference at Gustavus, I think it is important to remind ourselves of how the conference began. The college was planning to build a new science building during its Centennial year. For some of you alums, you will remember that. It was in 1962. Then President Edgar Carlson traveled to Sweden to ask the Nobel Foundation if when a new science building is completed whether we could name the building the Alfred Nobel Hall of Science and they agreed we have the Nobel Hall of Science. He was bold enough to ask the foundation then that when the building would be completed in 1964 if we could possibly invite all of the living Nobel laureates to St. Peter here on a hill in a small town in Minnesota looking over the river valley. That was pretty visionary wasn't it? 26 Nobel laureates came to St. Peter for what was the first such gathering of science scholars and is now the Nobel conference at Gustavus. Today we are celebrating the fact that we have now had a total of 100 Nobel laureates visit our campus since that first conference. After conferring the honorary degrees here in a short while over 100 laureates will have received an honorary degree from the Gustavus. I think that's pretty special. You might look at the banners along the wall that are from the earlier conferences so when you have time between the lectures you might want to walk around and remind yourself of those. I'm always amazed of how many people attend year in and year out and how many new ones we have coming. So a simple test here let's just raise our hands if this is our first Nobel conference. That's great. Wow you're in for a great experience and please come back. For those who have been here for more years than one please raise your hand. That's really great and now the real test and I know there are a few here of those seated how many have been to every Nobel conference please stand so we can recognize you. They're right over here right over here. Isn't that great thank you. I also think it is important to point out that the Nobel conference at Gustavus has been made possible over the years through very significant and generous support. I call your attention to the descriptive materials in the program that outline the fact that the Nobel conference endowment fund was originally created in July of 1978 and has been permanently secured now as a result of the generous support of the Reverend Drell and Adline Bernardsen. Other gifts to the endowment fund are listed in the program and I hope you'll look through that. We also want to acknowledge the 2013 sponsors of the Nobel conference and they are listed in the program. One of our sponsors is Heroic Productions owned by Gustavus Alums John and Anita Young. Heroic Productions is truly heroic. They provide the extraordinary media production you are enjoying in this arena today and thousands more will be able to view the conference remotely and because of their tremendous work we thank you John and Anita for all that you do for the college. At Gustavus we believe the Nobel conference represents all that is good about a liberal arts education in an undergraduate residential college environment. Today more than ever before questions are being asked about the value of a liberal arts education. Many are wanting to quantify education by comparing the value of education at one institution versus another by looking solely at what many call the return on investment ROI. You've read it in the news print. You've seen it on television. Education cannot be quantified by simply looking at the jobs graduates receive or the salaries they are paid. We believe Gustavus is a place where there's return on investment but we need to look at much more than the simple economics being discussed around the country. We believe we need to be talking about ROI but also ROE the return on a Gustavus education for a lifetime. The Nobel conference and other opportunities for our students provide them with a deeper understanding of their place in the world and how they can make a difference. The learning outcomes of liberal arts education demonstrates how that education will be lived out over a lifetime by our students. Our alumni are the living proof of the real return on investment the return on a Gustavus education. Thank you for being here to take part in this significant learning opportunity for all of us that will help enrich our lives as we expand upon our education and live out our lives meaningfully in an ever-changing world. I would hope that all of us as we learn about the universe at its limits would be mindful of the opportunities we have had as individuals and we have had collectively to stretch to stretch beyond our limits because of the education we have received. Now it is my pleasure to introduce three outstanding Gustavus faculty who help students stretch beyond the limits. First I want to introduce Dr. Steve Melema, professor of physics. Steve would you please stand. Steve is the chair of this year's conference and you will meet him later. He will be moderating some of the discussion. He and his colleagues have worked tirelessly for more than a year now to organize this year's conference. Thank you Steve for all that you and your colleagues have done. Secondly I would like to introduce and have Dr. Chuck Niederiter stand. Chuck is a professor of physics. He has served for the last five years as director of the Nobel conference and is stepping down this year from the director's position a role that he has served admirably and brought significant strength to this program and to this college. In the conference's 49th year we have had only three Nobel conference directors. Chuck on behalf of all of us at Gustavus including the board of trustees the faculty staff and students and I might add the thousands that have attended the Nobel conferences over the past five years we say thank you. Finally I would like to ask Dr. Scott Burdistan. Scott is the associate professor of chemistry and he will serve as the next director. Pretty big shoes to fill Scott. He will serve as the director this next year. He has been working with Chuck and with Steve and all of their faculty colleagues over the last year to think about ways we can continue to build upon the strong traditions of the past 49 years. Next year as I mentioned will be the 50th year for the Nobel conference. You will be receiving information and I think there's actually some flyers in the back about the 50th Nobel. We will be looking retrospectively over the last 49 years as we begin to look at the next 50 years of the Nobel conference and the tradition that we have. We will be you will be delighted when you hear more about the programs from Scott and his colleagues. Scott, thank you for accepting this responsibility. I now ask before we recognize three distinguished Nobel laureates with honorary degrees to have Provost Mark Braun come to the podium. Provost Braun is in his third year now at Gustavus's provost and he is leading a tremendous faculty. He is an individual that served on this faculty for 17 years before he left here for a little time away as the chief academic officer at Augustana College in Sioux Falls. We are so pleased to have him here and he will be making his remarks and introducing Dr. Niederreiter for his conference overview. Mark, thank you President Oly. Could I ask the faculty to please rise? On behalf of the faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College, we welcome all of you to this 49th Nobel conference. Thank you faculty. It is consistent with our mission as a liberal arts college that we annually invite to the conference speakers and panelists who approach the subject from many perspectives. The process begins with conversations on campus designed to identify and refine a topic and assemble a Gustavus faculty committee to explore the best scholars in the world to address that topic. The conversation then expands to include our invited speakers who present their unique perspectives as the talks are designed and coordinated. And now that we are all assembled here, the conversation really takes wing. We will come to a deeper appreciation of the topic through the presentations, through the dialogue among the panelists following each lecture, and through the questions from our audience. I invite all of you, the on-campus audience and the online viewers worldwide to actively join in the conversation on the universe at its limits. Now it's my pleasure to invite to the podium to launch our conversation, the director of the Nobel conference, Gustavus physics professor Dr. Charles Niederreiter. It is my pleasure to welcome everyone to this, the 39th 49th installment of the Nobel conference, the universe at its limits. For those of you who are with us for the first time a special welcome, for nearly 50 years the Nobel conference has specialized in important scientific issues and their relevance to contemporary society. For myself and my colleagues in physics, this is our dream conference. What could be more noble than attacking the questions of the origins, constituents, and evolution of our universe? Or what could be more challenging? Leave it to the physicists. Those of us who made it to the end of an introductory astronomy course realized that the seemingly opposite lines of inquiry that began in ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago, astronomy and the study of what is inside manner, both provide answers to the questions of the origin, constituents, and evolution of the universe. Indeed, we need both astronomy, the study of what is outside beyond the boundaries of earth, and the study of the realm of subatomic particles and the fundamental forces in nature in order to put together a coherent picture of our universe and how it got this way. The Nobel conference 49 committee has put together a panel of experts in both areas to help us answer questions about dark energy and the acceleration of the universe to candidates for dark matter and its role in holding the whole thing together. Embedded in all of this are questions about how it all got started that initiate a discussion of the relationships between science and faith. At this time, let's meet our speakers. Dr. Frank Wilczek, Hermann Feschbeck Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a 2004 Nobel Laureate in Physics, will get us started thinking about the connections between the very large and very small and the basic rules of our universe. Dr. Tarrish Shears, Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool and Royal Society University Research Fellow at CERN, will tell us about research at the Large Hadron Collider and perhaps about the discovery of the Higgs boson. All right, we have a little problem with order here. Okay, I think I figured it out. Alex Filipinko is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California Berkeley. And Dr. Alex Filipinko will talk to us about his research in the accelerating expansion of the universe. We'll hear about the quest to identify dark matter from Dr. Samuel Ting, Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor of Physics at MIT and a 1976 Nobel Laureate in Physics. Dr. George Smoot is Professor of Physics at the University of California Berkeley, Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Professor of Physics at Paris Diderot University and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. Professor Smoot will help us understand what we can learn about the early universe from leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Dr. Lawrence Krause, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, will give us an idea what science can tell us about the origin of the universe. The Emeritus Director of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne, who is currently McDivitt Chair of Religious Philosophy at Lemoine College, will help us explore the relationships between the religious view of the origin of the universe and that of science. Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr is the Regents Professor, John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland. As this year's Rydell Professor, Ika Stavis, he has already started getting us to think about the underlying symmetry of the universe and I hope that he will continue with his lecture at our banquet tomorrow evening. I also would like to acknowledge one of the leaders in exploration of the universe, Dr. Vera Rubin. Dr. Rubin was the first to recognize the existence of dark matter in her studies of rotational velocities of stars and galaxies. We invited her to be with us and after initially accepting, she later informed us that her health wasn't good enough for her to travel to St. Peter. We wish her well and hope that she enjoys watching the conference on her computer. Our panel of speakers was put together by a committee chaired by my colleagues, Steve Mila, as President Oli said. Steve had help from our, had help from our colleagues in physics, Tom Huber and Jesse Patrika, as well as colleagues in math and computer science, Tom LaFarro and Mike Vidsden, and from chemistry, Steve Mila and Larry Potts. You will meet them and other faculty hosts over the next, over the course of the next two days. I need to also acknowledge the assistance of a myriad of students who have helped or are helping in various ways. At this time I'd also like to call your attention to other events taking place on campus with the Nobel conference. At 6 p.m. tonight our art at the Nobel conference reception at the Hillstrom Museum of Art featuring string theory and the superconducting super collider series, paintings by Lucinda Mason, just to name a few. And at 8 p.m. this evening the Nobel conference concert, Dark Energy, in Christchapel. Professor Yumiko Oshima Ryan has put together a real treat for us. As we continue to evaluate the Nobel conference at Gustavus we ask you to take a little time to fill out a survey to help us in this endeavor. A link to this survey will appear on the Nobel conference website on Thursday and will be emailed out to those for whom we have email addresses. So once again welcome to all of you. We're looking forward to an exciting two days. If you've been with us before you probably know of the Gustavus tradition of bestowing honorary degrees on Nobel laureates who visit campus. So at this time I'd like to call to the platform Professor Samuel Ting and citator Professor Huber for the conferral of the first honorary degree. President Oli, Provost Braun, Deans Goodin O'Loughlin, distinguished panelists, faculty, and Nobel conference guests. Today Gustavus Adolphus College honors Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Physics at MIT. Dr. Ting has dedicated his career to experiments exploring the fundamental constituents of the universe. His ability to identify challenging areas for research and then assemble a large international collaboration to achieve difficult physical physics goals is remarkable. His experiments have been critical in the development of the standard model and exploring physics beyond the standard model. In the early 1970s Dr. Ting assembled a collaboration with a nearly unprecedented goal to build a high-resolution electron-positron spectrometer that could operate with the intense proton beam at Brookhaven National Lab. As with all of his subsequent experiments construction of this detector took tremendous creativity and attention to details. In 1974 this persistence was rewarded with their discovery of the J particle which provided direct experimental evidence for the existence of the Charm Quark. Dr. Ting shared the Nobel Prize in 1976 for this discovery. Dr. Ting was the leader of the L3 collaboration at the LEP accelerator at CERN. From 1989 until LEP shut down in 2000 to make room for the LHC the L3 collaboration involved hundreds of scientists from 50 institutions worldwide. Under Dr. Ting's leadership the L3 collaboration performed high resolution studies of the standard model predictions and performed searches for physics beyond the standard model. Dr. Ting's most recent and possibly most ambitious project was the construction, launch, and operation of the alpha magnetic spectrometer on the International Space Station. Only a physicist with Dr. Ting's stature and tenacity could have navigated the complicated technical and political challenge of this project. Design and construction of the one and a half billion dollar detector involved 500 scientists from 16 countries. Even after it was fully constructed it took an intensive lobbying effort by Dr. Ting to convince NASA, the president, and Congress to add one final space shuttle flight of of the of endeavor to transport the detector to the space station. Although it has been in operation for only two years this detector has provided tantalizing hints about the nature of dark matter in the universe. President Oli, for his contributions in experimental particle physics the faculty of Gustavus Dolphus College recommends that Samuel Ting be awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Science. Now by the virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Trustees of Gustavus Dolphus College and upon the recommendation of the faculty and approval of the Board of Trustees I hereby confer upon you Dr. Samuel Ting the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, with all the rights privileges and honors pertaining thereto. Now I'd like to call to the platform Professor Frank Wilczek and citator Professor Vison for the conferral of the second honorary degree. President Oli, Provost Brown, Dean's Good and Elafin, distinguished panelists, faculty and Nobel guests. Today Gustavus Dolphus College honors Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, the Hermann Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT. Frank Wilczek received the Nobel Prize in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student at Princeton University when he was only 21 years old. He along with his advisor David Gross developed the theory of quantum chromodynamics also known as QCD. Their theory independently developed by David Politzer who also shared the prize in 2004 describes the strong interactions which govern the behavior of quarks ever so tiny particles that combine to make protons and neutrons the basis for all of the matter that we see around us. The Nobel Foundation in presenting this award stated the discovery which is awarded this year's Nobel Prize is of decisive importance for our understanding of how the theory of one of nature's fundamental forces works. The force that ties together the smallest pieces of matter the quarks. David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek have through their theoretical contributions made it possible to complete the standard model of particle physics the model that describes the smallest objects in nature and how they interact. At the same time it constitutes an important step in the endeavor to provide a unified description of all the forces of nature regardless of the spatial scale from the tiniest distances within the atomic nucleus to the vast distances of the universe. Dr. Wilczek has received many awards and honors for outstanding work in theoretical physics. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990 and is awarded the Lorentz Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science in 2002. He holds honorary degrees from the Ohio State University and the Maria Curie Sklodowska University among others. Frank Wilczek has worked on an unusually wide range of topics including condensed matter physics astrophysics and particle physics. He has helped to reveal and develop axions anions asymptotic freedom the color superconducting phases of cork matter and other aspects of quantum field theory. He is an active writer not only of scholarly papers in theoretical physics but also of works aimed at translating this sometimes overly dense language of mathematics and physics into stories and adventures to which we can all relate. He has published three popular books Longing for the Harmonies written with his wife Betsy Fantastic Realities and the Lightness of Being. President Oli for his contributions to developing the theory of quantum chromodynamics the faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College recommends that Frank Wilczek be awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Science. Now by the virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Trustees of Gustavus Adolphus College and upon the recommendation of the faculty and the approval of the Board of Trustees I hereby confer upon you Dr. Frank Wilczek the degree of Doctor of Science Honoris Causa with all the rights privileges and honors pertaining thereto. Finally I'd like to call to the platform Professor George Smoot and Citator Professor Patrika for the conferral of our last honorary degree. President Oli, Provost Braun, Dean's Good and Olafin distinguished panelists faculty and Nobel conference guests. Today Gustavus Adolphus College honors Nobel laureate George F. Smoot III Professor of Physics at the University of California Berkeley and Paris Diderot University. Professor Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics with John Mather for quote their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation end quote. In the mid 1970s Professor Smoot and his collaborators developed a proposal for a satellite to study the cosmic microwave background the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This mission known as the Cosmic Background Explorer or COBIE was launched into orbit on November 18th 1989 and contained three instruments. One was an instrument to measure the spatial variations or anisotropies of the microwave background. A second instrument was to measure precisely the spectrum of this background and a third instrument was to measure the infrared background. Professor Smoot was the principal investigator of the instrument used to search for anisotropies. This instrument spent a number of years mapping the temperature across the sky a task made more difficult by the need to remove nearby galactic sources and the Doppler effect produced by the motion of the earth. This was done to a resolution of better than 50 micro kelvin in temperature and 10 degrees spatially in the sky. In April 1992 the COBIE team announced that their map had for the first time seen density variations that could serve as seeds for galaxies and galactic clusters to the then evolving universe as temperature variation seen now directly correlates with the density variation of the early cosmos. Professor Smoot continues his research in cosmology and is involved in the Planck mission a third generation experiment to map the cosmic background. In addition he's the author of more than 200 scientific articles and co-authored the book Wrinkles in Time which detailed his efforts. His other honors include the 1991 NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the 1995 Lawrence Award, the 2003 Einstein Medal, and the 2009 Orsted Medal. President Oley for his contributions to observational astrophysics and cosmology the faculty of Gustavus Dolphus College recommends that George Smoot be awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Science. Now by the virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Trustees of Gustavus Dolphus College and upon the recommendation of the faculty and approval of the Board of Trustees I hereby confer upon you Dr. George Smoot the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa with all of the rights privileges and honors pertaining thereto. What a wonderful opportunity to recognize three outstanding scholars. Let's give all three a round of applause again. As we close this opening ceremony of this magnificent 49th Nobel Conference at Gustavus it is my pleasure to welcome to the podium Reverend Brian Conkel to close the ceremony with a blessing. Following his blessing we will leave the podium go down take a break get everything set up we're not going to leave the auditorium we're going to start right into the first presentation so you can stand and rest and relax and meet some of the folks that are next to you. This truly is a great day at Gustavus Dolphus College and it's a wonderful opportunity to invite and to have these individuals here at our institution for this great day. Dr. Chuck Chaplin Bryant received the blessing spirit of life subject of many possibilities object of many identities is the wheel of stars move above us the plates of the earth shift below us the web of neurons reposition within us we give thanks for those beautiful moments in time when cosmic possibilities become our experienced realities may we all be so blessed that we may honor this time together in the spirit of integrity and intrigue so that our collective gifts may be animated facilitated and agitated so we may remember who we are lift up what matters most and be set free to explore the many possibilities of life in its fullness so let it be so so let us be blessed