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Front cover exposure for RBSC, UBC Library Vault

The April 2010 issue of College & Research Libraries News, an American publication, features an image from UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections on the front cover. Some additional information about the image and the UBC Library Vault is provided inside the publication.

You can view the issue here.

IKBLC Webcast of Don Page's Black Hole Information Loss: Hawking's Greatest Mistake?

Hawking’s 1974 calculation of thermal emission from a classical black hole led to his 1976 proposal that information may be lost from our universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole, which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation. Objections to this idea appeared as early as 1980, but it took two decades for the balance of opinion, including Hawking’s, to shift to the belief that information is not ultimately lost by black holes. The debate led to a lot of understanding of gravitational physics, so even if Hawking was originally wrong, it was a truly great mistake. (March 17, 2010). Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Don Page is a Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Growing up in Alaskan villages, he completed his high school education by correspondence through the University of Nebraska Extension Division. He received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, summa cum laude, from William Jewell College in Missouri, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis, “Accretion into and Emission from Black Holes”, was supervised by Kip S. Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Page then moved to the University of Cambridge, England, where he held a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, worked as a research assistant under Prof. Hawking, and received an M.A.

Douglas Coupland speaks at the Learning Centre for Media Studies conference

The upcoming Media Transatlantic conference, which focuses on the topic of media studies, runs from Thursday, April 8 – Saturday, April 10 at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Registration is required for the conference, but all are welcome to attend the keynote address by B.C. writer and artist Douglas Coupland, which takes place at 5:15 pm on April 8 in the Learning Centre’s Golden Jubilee Room (top level). This will be followed by a reception in the Lillooet Room on level three.

All other events are scheduled to take place in the Dodson Room, also on level three.

An international roster of media scholars will attend the conference – more information can be found at http://www.mediatrans.ca.