| Strange Views of Space and Time: From Einstein to String Theory | | |  | | Gary Horowitz - University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) | | In honour of the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's 'miraculous year', I will describe the modern view of space and time. I will start with special relativity, then describe how space and time are modified in Einstein's general theory of relativity, and end with recent ideas coming out of string theory. In all cases, the view of space and time arising from modern physics is radically different from our everyday experience, yet many of their strange properties have already been confirmed by experiment. | | Date: Tuesday Nov 15, 2005 @ 3:00:00 pm | |
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| Meet the 'Other' Einstein | | |  | | John Stachel | | It is well known that Einstein worked to develop a unified field theory that would encompass all of physics including (he hoped) all quantum phenomena. It is not so well known that there was 'another Einstein,' who from 1916 on was skeptical about the continuum as a foundational element in physics, especially because of the existence of quantum phenomena. This talk will discuss the evidence for the existence of 'the other Einstein' and his efforts to find what he called 'a purely algebraic physics.' | | Date: Sunday Oct 23, 2005 @ 10:00:00 am | |
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| Faster than the Speed of Light: Could the Laws of Physics Change? | | |  | | Joao Magueijo - Imperial College | | Could the laws of physics change? The laws of physics are usually meant to be set in stone; variability is not usually part of physics. Yet contradicting Einstein's tenet of the constancy of the speed of light raises nothing less than that possibility. I will discuss some of the more dramatic implications of a varying speed of light. al, dimensionless, Bekenstein, Brans-Dicke, varying constant, Einstein, time dilation, length contraction, horizons, Big Bang, grand-unified theory, Planck length, Planck time, gravity, space, time, quantum gravity, varying alpha, Kelvin, q [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 22, 2005 @ 2:00:00 pm | |
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| Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc | | |  | | Arthur Miller - Mount Allison University | | The most important scientist of the twentieth century, and its most important artist, went through their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances: Einstein's special theory of relativity and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It turns out they were both working on the same problem: the nature of space and time and, more particularly, simultaneity. When they produced these astonishing works, Einstein and Picasso were not the distinguished elderly figures that later became so familiar: they were in their twenties, unknown, feisty, dirt-poor, and prone to getting into trouble - their personal and creative beauty caused havoc. Arthur M [read more]. | | Date: Monday Oct 17, 2005 @ 7:00:00 pm | |
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| Einstein's Political Priorities: World Government | | |  | | David Rowe | | Although Einstein emerged as a leading spokesman for pacifism in 1930, his political views already underwent a major shift even before Hitler came to power in January 1933. Disappointment with negotiations at the 1932 Disarmament Conference in Geneva led him to the conclusion that the only hope of averting a major war was the creation of a strong world government. Only after the Second World War did he have the opportunity to promote this political cause, however, partly by taking advantage of his event image as grandfather of the bomb. Though he in fact played no significant part in the events that led up to the Manhattan project, in the wake of Hiroshima he became an active spokesman c [read more]. | | Date: Sunday Oct 16, 2005 @ 2:00:00 pm | |
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| Companion Stars: Einstein and Gödel at the Institute for Advanced Study | | |  | | John Dawson | | Two of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, were colleagues in Princeton during the years 1940-55. This talk will explore the contrasting personalities, revolutionary results, consonant world views, and confluent interests in the nature of time that underlay their bond of friendship. | | Date: Sunday Oct 16, 2005 @ 12:00:00 pm | |
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| Einstein Recovers Judaism and Discovers Politics | | |  | | Robert Schulmann | | Before 1919 Einsteins political and social interests lay fallow, their moral roots unarticulated. This talk argues that it was his search for Jewish identity as a forty-year old in the years after World War I, as well as his growing commitment to Zionism, that laid the foundation for his active political engagement. We will examine the trajectory of Einsteins ambiguous relationship with Judaism and Jewish settlement in Palestine from 1919 until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Einsteins views over this 30-year period will be set in the context of the tragic interweaving of Hitlers absolute rule in Germany and the destruction of European Jews. Einstein, Robert Schulman [read more]. | | Date: Sunday Oct 16, 2005 @ 10:00:00 am | |
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| From Romanticism to Modernism: Music in Einstein's World | | |  | | Walter Frisch - Columbia University | | This talk will examine the critical period in European concert music in the years around 1900, when the first generation of modernists--including Schoenberg, Mahler, Bartok, Debussy, and Stravinsky--were forging new musical languages. These composers were not revolutionaries. All remained deeply attached to their musical pasts, to traditions of tonality, syntax, and form. But each was able to re-imagine in a unique fashion the legacies of the nineteenth century to create powerful music fully characteristic of the dawning century. | | Date: Saturday Oct 15, 2005 @ 5:00:00 pm | |
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| Albert Einstein: The Man Behind the Genius - for ages 12 and up | | |  | | Alice Calaprice | | Albert Einstein remains one of most famous scientists in world history. His image is instantly recognizable and for many people, Einstein personifies genius. But who was Einstein really? What was he like as a person? What did his science actually mean? From his years in Europe where he was known mainly for his scientific genius to his life in the United States where his scientific contributions declined as he aged as he became more involved in the political, humanitarian, and social concerns, Alice Calaprice, co author of Albert Einstein, a biography explores the man behind the genius. | | Date: Saturday Oct 15, 2005 @ 2:00:00 pm | |
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| Einstein's Rise to Fame | | | | | David Rowe | | In November 1919 the British scientific community announced the confirmation of Einstein's prediction for the bending of light by the suns gravitational field. This announcement made sensational headlines in British and American papers, and soon thereafter Einstein was thrust into the stratosphere of stardom. To appreciate this phenomenon requires taking a closer look at the role of leading image makers of the day, particularly in Weimar era Germany. The intense media coverage of Einstein and his theory did much to stimulate event fascination, producing results that were at times odd, occasionally ridiculous, and in some cases polarizing, like so many other phenomena of Weimar culture. To [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 15, 2005 @ 12:00:00 pm | |
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| 'Beware of Rotten Compromises': The Moral Foundations of Einsteins Politics | | | | | Robert Schulmann | | Morality defined Albert Einsteins sense of social obligation and political justice. It thrust on him a lifelong sense of responsibility for the defenceless and the underprivileged. At the same time, his jealously guarded independence dictated a kind of splendid isolation that made him indifferent to the temptations of political influence. How did this sense of commitment arise? What were the sources of his fierce independence? How did he resolve the contradiction? This talk will explore the roots in Einsteins childhood, youth, and early professional career, covering the years from the early 1880s until 1919 when he burst onto the world stage. Robert Schulmann, politics, biography, E [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 15, 2005 @ 10:00:00 am | |
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| 1905 - A Literary Response to Modernity | | |  | | Stanley Corngold - Princeton University | | This talk deals with representative works of German and Hapsburg fiction ca. 1905a literature produced by the genius of Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Robert Musil (1880-1942) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924), registering swiftly changing perceptions of human time and space owing to the frenetic pace of Central European modernizationof technical innovations in the manufacture of commodities; of the acquisition of wealth, producing changes in class-structure; of the growth of cities, creating centers of simultaneous but dissociated activity requiring new medial connectionprocesses greeted by some writers as matters of great intellectual interest, by others as signs [read more]. | | Date: Friday Oct 14, 2005 @ 7:00:00 pm | |
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| Probing the Geometry of Space - Mathematics circa 1900 | | | | | David Rowe | | One of the most hotly debated topics of the late nineteenth century concerned the geometry of physical space, an issue that arose with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. Lobachevsky and Bolyai opened the way, but it was not until the 1860s that scientists began to take this revolutionary theory seriously. Assuming the free mobility of rigid bodies, Helmholtz concluded that the geometry of space was Euclidean or else of constant curvature (either positive of negative). In 1899 these cases were tested by the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild who used data on stellar parallax to estimate the minimum size of the universe. Many argued that the notion of a curved space was nonsensical, whereas [read more]. | | Date: Thursday Oct 13, 2005 @ 7:00:00 pm | |
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| 1905: The Philosophical Context | | |  | | Ray Monk - University of Southampton | | What was happening in Philosophy in 1905? This lecture will seek to answer that question by picking out some of the most influential works of philosophy that were published in or shortly before that year, describing both those works themselves and their intellectual context. The works discussed will include Henri Poincare's Science and Hypothesis, Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations, Gottlob Frege's Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic and Bertrand Russell's 'On Denoting'. What I hope to bring out is how the seminal works of that period established the tone and content of twentieth century philosophy and drew the battlelines of the great philosophical disputes of the last hundred years: [read more]. | | Date: Wednesday Oct 12, 2005 @ 7:00:00 pm | |
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| Exploration to the Ends of the Earth: Roald Amundsen, the Quest for the Northwest Passage and the Quest for the Poles | | |  | | James Delgado | | In 1905, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed the first ever transit of the fabled Northwest Passage, culminating a centuries long quest that had claimed ships and lives. Amundsen's feat was one of many human achievements in the first decade of the new century, and a landmark in the history exploration. Amundsen's voyage was preceded by the controversial North Pole expedition of Robert Peary, another long sought prize of explorers. Amundsen's quests shifted south to Antarctica and the South Pole, a prize he achieved, and then back to the Arctic, when he tried and failed to navigate, locked in the polar ice, to the North Pole. This presentation will examine the life, feats, trials, [read more]. | | Date: Sunday Oct 09, 2005 @ 12:00:00 pm | |
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| Approaching Babel: Psychology as a 'new science' in 1905 | | |  | | Sonu Shamdasani | | At the turn of the century, numerous figures were attempting to form a new unitary science of psychology, modelled on how they imagined sciences like physics and chemistry functioned, with the discovery of universal laws and discoverers who would be proclaimed to be on the scale of Copernicus and Newton. It was intended that the formation of this new science would be nothing less than the completion of the scientific revolution, and that as a consequence, it would transform psychiatry, psychotherapy, the human sciences and indeed, all walks of life. Already by 1905, this dream was receding in an endless proliferation of competing and incompatible practices and conceptions - and one which has [read more]. | | Date: Tuesday Oct 04, 2005 @ 7:00:00 pm | |
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| June and September 1905: Reshaping Space, Time and Energy | | |  | | John Rigden - American Institute of Physics | | Few, if any, papers have attracted as much attention as Einsteins June paper on the Special Theory of Relativity and no equation of physics has become part of common discourse except for the equation Einstein presented in his September paper: E = mc2. The concepts of space and time are ubiquitous in physics and, since the Special Theory of Relativity fundamentally altered these concepts, the impact of the June paper on physics has been pervasive. With the additional assertion, made in the June paper, that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, time and space became relative. From his Theory of Relativity, Einstein produced his September surprise: ponderable mass and incorporea [read more]. | | Date: Sunday Oct 02, 2005 @ 2:00:00 pm | |
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| April and May 1905: Witnessing Atoms | | | | | John Rigden - American Institute of Physics | | In 1905, there were prominent scientists who did not believe in atoms. Einstein did. His April and May papers were motivated in part to support the concept of atoms. The April paper, Einsteins dissertation and one of his most cited papers, shows how the dimensions of a sugar molecule, suspended in water, can be determined. His method had many practical applications, hence the citations. In the May paper, a pollen particle took the place of a sugar molecule. For decades, the irregular, zig-zagging motion of pollen particles was a mystery. In a paper that is magic, Einstein showed how, with a simple ruler and a stopwatch, one could witness atoms at work and prove their existence. John S [read more]. | | Date: Sunday Oct 02, 2005 @ 10:00:00 am | |
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| March 1905: Einstein's Revolutionary Quantum Paper | | | | | John Rigden - American Institute of Physics | | Einsteins March paper, the only paper that Einstein himself called revolutionary, directly challenged the firm beliefs of all physicists. With compelling evidence in their support, physicists regarded the nature of light as a closed chapter: light was a continuous electromagnetic wave. Einstein countered this entrenched belief with the claim that light was a stream of discontinuous, isolated particles. The age-old conundrum of continuity vs. discontinuity was again called into play. Einsteins contemporaries totally rejected his idea and they even apologized for his having gone overboard. In the end, however, Einsteins light particle became part of the woodwork of physics. John [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 01, 2005 @ 4:00:00 pm | |
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| The Cultural Climate of Einsteins Europe around 1905 | | |  | | Stephen Kern | | Stephen Kern will set the stage for the Miraculous Year with an examination of the general cultural climate surrounding Einsteins eventations of 1905. Taking the fact that Einsteins most important paper begins with a discussion of simultaneity, Kern will consider how a variety of developments in the culture of the period involved a reworking of the experience of time and space, creating new ways of thinking about and experiencing simultaneity. Novelists developed new writing strategies to capture the simultaneity of events in new urban centers, painters rendered simultaneous views of frontal and profiled views of a single face, cinematic editing made it possible to offer moviegoers a sen [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 01, 2005 @ 12:00:00 pm | |
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| Setting the Stage for 1905 - The 19th Century: Physics becomes Queen of the Sciences and Part of Culture | | | | | John Rigden - American Institute of Physics | | The achievements of 19th Century physicists stand shoulder to shoulder with those of their 20th Century successors. Physics, per se, did not exist in 1800, but a century later, physics not only existed, but was regarded as the model for all sciences. During the 19th Century, the physics that dominates current introductory textbooks was brought to completion. Electricity and magnetism, two separate domains of Nature, were united as electromagnetism; the laws of thermodynamics were established; the kinetic theory of matter was developed in its current form; and the nature of light, the crowning achievement of 19th Century physics, was demonstrated to be an electromagnetic wave. The substantive [read more]. | | Date: Saturday Oct 01, 2005 @ 10:00:00 am | |
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