In 1992, Cuban physicist Luis Grave de Peralta was accused of “Pacific Rebellion,” and condemned to 13 years in prison. Three years before, he had been expelled from his teaching position in the Physics Department at the Oriente University, Santiago de Cuba, because he had renounced his militancy in the Cuban Communist Party. In this talk, he will describe his personal odyssey for returning to science. He believes that we can learn from every vital experience regardless of how pleasant or how painful the event is, and that the capacity to examine the world we live in is a valuable asset of every well formed physicist.

Grave de Peralta will illustrate his belief with an instructive physical example about fundamental ideas concerned with the nature of light. Photons are supposed to be the relativistic quanta carrying the energy of the light. They are not supposed to have simultaneously well defined values of position and momentum, i.e., photons should not travel through well defined trajectories. However, it is well known that in the classical electrodynamics picture of light, the Poynting vector describes the electromagnetic energy flux. Thus, why do numerous photons travel following well defined trajectories, while single photons do not exhibit this property? Grave de Peralta will share with the audience his thoughts about this paradox. Further, he will present the results of some recent experiments with intense femtosecond pulses of light at the TTU Nano Technology Center. He will also show that the results of these multiple slit experiments can be related to the topology of the electromagnetic energy flux.