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CORVALLIS - Svante Lindqvist, director of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, will give a free public lecture on Monday, March 7, at Oregon State University as part of the 2004-05 Horning Lecture Series.

His talk is titled "A Nobel Prize for Scientific Revolutions? Hannes Alfven and Conflicting Cosmologies." It begins at 4 p.m. in Weniger Hall 153.

In his talk, Lindqvist will discuss the concept of "revolutions" in science, a term borrowed from politics that he says doesn't accurately describe the scientific enterprise. Lindqvist will discuss a theory espoused by Hannes Alfven, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his studies in plasma physics, yet also supported a different theory of plasma cosmology that challenged the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe.

Lindqvist is a member of the Royal Swedish Academies of Sciences, Engineering Sciences, and Letters, History and Antiquities. He is former professor and department chair at the Royal Institute of Technology who has held visiting appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Churchill College in Cambridge.

The OSU series is sponsored by the university's Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities.