Science on Screen®: THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW with Dr. Kenneth Hicks

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Beyond the Geodesic Dome

Kenneth Hicks, PhD gives a talk on Buckyballs, Spaceship Earth, Synergy and other Legacies of Buckminster Fuller.

About the film

16-year-old Sebastian Prendergast has spent most of his life with his Nana in their geodesic dome home 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. But 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 with 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.

About the speaker

Ken Hicks 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.