Daniel Kleppner, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the 1999 Bethe Lectures in physics

March 29 through April 7 on the Cornell campus. Kleppner also is the associate director of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Kleppner will present four lectures, three of them colloquia for the Cornell physics community and the fourth a free lecture for the general public. The public lecture, "Views From a Garden of Worldly Delights," will be April 7, 7:30 p.m., Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall. In this talk Kleppner will discuss the manner in which ancient thought evolved into contemporary inquiry.

The physics colloquia will be presented March 29, when Kleppner will discuss his work on "Bose-Einstein Condensation of Atomic Hydrogen," and April 5, when the topic will be "How Physics Got Precise," both at 4:30 p.m., Schwartz Auditorium; and March 30 when Kleppner's subject will be "Bridging the Gap: Connecting the Quantum and Classical Worlds Experimentally," at 4:30 p.m., 700 Clark Hall.

Kleppner has been at the frontier of experimental atomic research since the mid-1960s when he co-invented the hydrogen maser, one of the most accurate clocks ever built. More recently he has been a major participant in the recently successful efforts to bring about the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic gases, previously observed only in liquid helium.

The physicist earned his doctoral degree in 1959 at Harvard University, where he later became assistant professor of physics. He joined the MIT faculty as associate professor of physics in 1966 and was named a full professor in 1974. The American Physical Society awarded Kleppner its Lilienfeld Prize for his "outstanding contributions to physics."

The Bethe lectures honor Cornell professor emeritus Hans Bethe, a member of the physics department since 1935 and the winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967.