Courtesy of the Athena Cinema.
Ohio University’s Athena Cinema is excited to announce its second Science on Screen® event of the year, featuring the film “The House of Tomorrow,” with Dr. Kenneth Hicks giving the talk, “Beyond the Geodesic Dome” about Buckyballs, Spaceship Earth, Synergy and other Legacies of Buckminster Fuller, on April 23 at 7 p.m.
The film follows 16-year-old Sebastian Prendergast, who has spent most of his life with his Nana in their geodesic dome home, a tourist attraction where she raises him on the futurist teachings of her former mentor Buckminster Fuller in hopes that one day Sebastian will carry Fuller’s torch and make the world a better place. When a stroke sidelines Nana, Sebastian begins sneaking around with Jared, a chain-smoking, punk-obsessed 16-year-old with a heart transplant who lives in the suburbs with his Bible-thumping single father Alan and teenage sister Meredith.
Sebastian and Jared form a band, and between his Nana’s dreams, his first real friendship and a church talent show at stake, Sebastian must decide if he wants to become the next Buckminster Fuller, the next Sid Vicious or something else entirely.
Speaking after the film is Hicks, who does research in the area of experimental nuclear/particle physics. Along with his graduate students, he publishes prolifically in this area, where he is a co-author on hundreds of papers in physics research journals. He also does research in pure mathematics, where he has published a few articles in the branch of mathematics called finite fields.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and is currently Secretary-Treasurer in the Division of Nuclear Physics of the APS. His primary research interest is the forces between quarks and gluons, which make up strongly-interacting particles like the proton and the neutron. In order to study such small particles, he travels to a national accelerator facility, called Jefferson Lab, located in Virginia. Using beams of high-velocity electrons, which scatter from protons, this acts like an electron-microscope that can peer into the heart of the proton and sheds light on the subatomic interactions of quarks and gluons.
The Athena’s Science on Screen program, started in 2012, is a series of events pairing feature films and documentaries with presentations by acclaimed scientific experts and technological innovators. Science on Screen is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation where events are fun and engaging and offer these dynamic speakers an unexpected platform from which to teach us about their field of expertise in a way that is accessible to a diverse audience.