Many of the most urgent challenges facing Society involve answering this question: How can we understand, manage and maybe even predict extreme behaviors in a system, whether it be comprised of non-living or living matter, or both? I will try to convince you that buried in this (as-yet unanswered) question, lies a wealth of interesting physics. Even when that system is largely composed of humans, the most powerful tools across all disciplines are proving to be those of physics: many-body out-of-equilibrium systems, complex dynamical networks, critical phenomena, kinetic theory, and even Green's Functions and Feynman diagrams. One of the examples of societal threats that I will discuss arises in the subsecond regime -- and has a curious connection to recent bizarre behaviors in the prices of land near Argonne National Lab

Argonne Physics Division Colloquium Schedule