Nerd Nite East Bay: Thermal Comfort, Quantum Communist, East Bay Hills History

Questioning the Core of Quantum Physics with Communists

Quantum physics attempts to explain reality, but Heisenberg and Bohr’s famous “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics fails to answer some simple questions and paradoxes about the real world. A revolutionary second theory, encouraged by Einstein, answered many of these questions with faster than light “pilot waves” and instant connections between distant particles, but was weighed down by the Communist associations of the discoverer, David Bohm, and forgotten during Bohm’s exile to Brazil. Learn how Bohm’s theory simultaneously provokes backlash in the physics community and also provided inspiration for Bell’s Theorem and modern quantum information processing, all without killing Schrödinger’s cat.

Speaker: Adam Becker, Author

Turning Up the Thermo-State: Engineering Comfort Into the Built Environment

Creating comfortable spaces once relied on keeping a building’s temperature between 70 and 75 degrees, but modern engineering and architecture has expanded to include design decisions that create the sensation of thermal comfort even outside rigid temperature parameters. Learn about the differences between naturally ventilated vs. air conditioned buildings, and discover the modern engineering tricks that tweak expectations and manipulate mental perception to create comfort in the built environment, even for individuals with very different coziness requirements.

Speaker: Jared Landsman, Integral Group

Towering Trees and the Wild West of the East Bay

Before the Oakland Hills were dotted with million dollar homes they were truly part of the Wild West. Yankee bullwhackers, indigenous people of the Bay Area, and Californios of Mexican descent all lived and worked in the shadow of the massive redwoods, with trees taller than the Tribune Tower providing distinct ecological environments, timber, and even navigation aid to ships entering San Francisco Bay. Learn about the early dwellers of the East Bay Hills, the natural history of the Bay Area’s tallest trees, and how modern science reverse-engineered information from old sea captain hazard lines to discover the location of legendary Redwoods found in the early literature of the East Bay.

Speakers: Amelia Sue Marshall, Author; John Nicoles, Forester