Café Scientifique: Season Two

After our successful first season, and a healthy summer break, we kicked off season two of Café Scientifique Syracuse last night, with a gathering of just under fifty people at our swanky downtown venue - Ambrosia. Our speaker for the all-important first talk was my friend and Café Scientifique Syracuse co-organizer Scott Samson, Jessie Page Heroy Professor and Chair of the Earth Sciences department. One of Scott's areas of expertise is geochronology, and his presentation was titled The Dating Game: How We Know the Earth is 4.5 Billion Years Old In 20 minutes precisely (and this is quite a feat, since keeping speakers to time is a real challenge in this setting), Scott was able to cover radiocarbon dating, the physics of solar system formation, the origin of the heavy elements, the role of plate tectonics (basically in making it particularly difficult to find rocks which date from the earliest ...