Cafe Scientifique Orlando is a gathering of scientifically-inclined people in Central Florida, who meet at a cafe, coffee house, pub, or nonacademic location to discuss events and ideas in the world of science. We enjoy beer and wine, and we use plain language to talk about extraordinary ideas.

Full Title: 
Deep Time and Shallow Thermodynamics: How we know the age of the solar system
Presenter: 
Britt, Dan
When: 
Wednesday, 2 February 2011 - 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Venue: 
Taste
Where: 
Taste
Street:
717 W. Smith Street
City:
Orlando
,
Province:
Florida
Postal Code:
32804
Country:
United States

The age of the solar system (and Earth) has had a long history of contentious debate, most famously in the last decade of the 19th century between Lord Kelvin and his one-time assistant John Perry. Today radiometric dating has the precision to detail events during the formation of the solar system and the geochemical evolution of the Earth. Dr Britt will review how we know the ages of the Solar System and the Earth and how that knowledge has changed our understanding of their formation and evolution.

Dr. Daniel Britt is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences in the Department of Physics at UCF. He was educated at the University of Washington and Brown University, receiving a Ph.D. from Brown in 1991. He has had a varied career including service in the US Air Force as an ICBM missile launch officer and an economist for Boeing before going into planetary sciences. He has served on the science teams of two NASA missions, Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1. He was the project manager for the camera on Mars Pathfinder and has built hardware for all the NASA Mars landers. He currently does research on the physical properties and mineralogy of asteroids, comets, and Mars under several NASA grants. Honors include 5 NASA Achievement Awards, election as a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid named after him: 4395 DanBritt. He was recently elected President of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

Slides of the presentation are available. MSFT PPT / ODP / PDF

Past Café Scientifique Events

Race to the Moon 18 November, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Good Bacteria 9 September, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Marine Ecosystems 8 August, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Solar System 7 July, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Robotics 6 June, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Cloud Computing 13 May, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Nanoscience 8 April, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Fire Ants 11 March, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Food Preservation 5 March, 2014 - 19:00 Eden Bar at...
Marine Mammals 11 February, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Bees 14 January, 2014 - 18:30 downtown library
Frankenfood 10 December, 2013 - 18:30 downtown library

Topics We'd Love to See

What are some topics you’d like to have? Tell us in your comments below. See our full schedule to know what we’ve had and plan to have, before adding something new.

Additionally, if you are a scientific expert interested in presenting a topic, please email us.

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