Introduction

This lecture was given on July 15th, 2023, at the "Thomistic Philosophy & Natural Science Symposium" at the Dominican House of Studies. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events Speaker Bio: Dr. Steve Mrenna is a scientist and particle theorist at the Fermi National Accelerator Science Laboratory, a premier U.S. particle physics lab. He is a contributor to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Dr. Mrenna works closely with Monte Carlo event generators, which are computer programs that simulate the complex structure of particle beam collisions at high energies. He is one of the primary authors of the Pythia event generator, and works to develop critical components of data analysis to relate observed data to theoretical models in particle physics. His work is at the crucial intersection of theory and practice in modern physics.