Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann will present a free public lecture titled “A Crude Look at the Whole,” on Wednesday, March 4, at 6 p.m. in the Wood Center Carol Brown Ballroom. For more information call 474-6264.

As the International Polar Year ends it is vital that we consider the data collected from a holistic perspective.  We are honored to present as the Lessons from Continuity and Change in the Fourth International Polar Year symposium keynote speaker, Murray Gell-Mann winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. Gell-Mann will speak on how specialized and disciplinary studies can be complemented by a process that examines the entirety of a project as transformative and not simply a collection of pieces. His talk will engage all those interested in thinking about how we research and discuss the Arctic and our world as it experiences change.

In policy studies and other efforts to deal with the future, we have a natural tendency to break up the work into discussions of different kinds of issues, treated separately, hoping that we can somehow glue those discussions together to get the whole picture.  For a complex nonlinear system, however, the whole is not really the sum of its parts.  We need to complement those specialized studies with a Crude Look at the Whole.