Sharon Begley has a terrific piece on Newsweek.com about the just-published THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME 12, The Berlin Years: Correspondence: January-December 1921, edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes, and the Einstein Papers Project.  You can read this piece here.

Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps will never again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.

Princeton University Press, as volume 12 in its Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, is publishing his correspondence for this amazing and critical year of his life. It includes the full text of 169 letters he wrote this year along with 180 that he received. Also included is a detailed calendar of his year that draws on information from hundreds of other documents. All told, the volume presents an exquisite and rich tapestry of Einstein’s initial involvement with the Zionist movement and with the United States, which 12 years later would become his home.

The sixth and final in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Theorem’s Implications for Science and Philosophy. In physics, Conway shows us, it the Free Will Theorem shows that there can be no mechanistic explanation for the “collapse of the wave function,” and so provides the strongest refutation of the “hidden variable” theories. Philosophically, Conway shows us the theorem leads us to infer that the future really is affected by free will decisions.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed our series of questions about mathematics and climate study to Tapio Schneider, a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Schneider conducts research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate changes, turbulence, and turbulent transport in the atmosphere and oceans. He is also co-editor with Adam H. Sobel of the PUP book The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Tapio Schneider: I am working on theories of how large-scale (>1000 km) atmospheric turbulence influences the global climate. For example, we study how turbulent transport affects tropical circulations and how it controls the distribution of atmospheric water vapor and rainfall.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

TS: I am fascinated by how nature works. I was trained as a physicist and loved how physics helped explain the inanimate world around me, from refrigerators to cell phones to the blue color of the sky and the red color of sunsets. I particularly like the physics of everyday phenomena—phenomena that occur roughly at the energy of sunlight (for example, many quantum phenomena occur at the energy of sunlight, and in part because of that, quantum devices such as the transistor revolutionized our life). When I was looking for a research area for graduate studies, I was looking for a young field with open questions to which young scientists can make lasting and fundamental contributions. Atmospheric dynamics is such a field—and the phenomena certainly occur at the energy of sunlight!

Our resident rocket scientist Ed Belbruno and his colleague from Princeton University, Richard Gott, are searching for the origins of the moon, using a theory they’ve proposed called the “Theia hypothesis.”  The “Theia hypothesis” starts with the popular Great Impact theory of the Moon’s origin. Many astronomers hold that in the formative years of the solar system, a Mars-sized protoplanet crashed into Earth. Debris from the collision, a mixture of material from both bodies, spun out into Earth orbit and coalesced into the Moon. This scenario explains many aspects of lunar geology including the size of the Moon’s core and the density and isotopic composition of moon rocks.

As NASA’s STEREO probes approach the Lagrange point, it is thought that remnants of the Mars-size protoplanet remain here.  Read all about this potentially-explosive discovery here on NASA’s webpage.

To read more about the fascinating science of space travel and the career of a mathematician at work in space exploration, read Belbruno’s captivating book FLY ME TO THE MOON: An Insider’s Guide to the New Science of Space Travel.

If you have any questions for Ed, leave them here and he’ll answer!

The fifth in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Proof of the Free Will Theorem. Here, Conway will show how relativity and the experimenter’s free will in choosing which experiment to perform yield the third axiom, MIN. He will then demonstrate how MIN, is used with SPIN, and TWIN to prove the Free Will Theorem, that particle behavior is not determined by the past.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

The fourth in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is Quantum Mechanics and the Paradoxes of Entanglement in which Conway will show how a particular case of the “Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen” entanglement, named the TWIN axiom by Conway and Kochen, is used to prove their theorem.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

April 2009 is Mathematics Awareness Month, and this year’s theme focuses on the importance of mathematics in climate science.  Here, acquiring editors Ingrid Gnerlich (Physical Sciences) and Vickie Kearn (Mathematics) discuss why the theme of climate is so important this April. We plan to post a series of interviews with our authors that specialize in this area of research and hope you’ll return periodically to read those. All of our Math Awareness material will be gathered here, so please feel free to link through from your blog! So without further delay — on to Ingrid and Vickie’s post!

Why climate? Why now?

Math Awareness Month celebrates the many ways math is used by  scientists to study the climate and Ingrid Gnerlich and Vickie Kearn of PUP say that’s a good thing.

One of the biggest challenges of our time is to fully understand the complexity of the global climate system.  Climate science is an interdisciplinary field of research that encompasses atmospheric science, oceanography, geology, biology/ecology, and even space and planetary science.  Climate scientists conduct in-depth research on key components of the climate system— such as the carbon cycle, ocean and atmosphere circulation, the biosphere, and the cryosphere — with the ultimate goal of understanding how each facet works and exactly how every component influences the system as a whole.  By understanding the fundamental physics behind the essential parts of the climate system and how these parts interact, climate scientists can answer exciting questions, like how the ocean circulates heat around the planet and varies weather patterns, how the composition of the atmosphere affects global temperature, how the melting of polar ice caps can lead to feedback effects, and how the climate of our planet thousands of years ago compares to today’s – and they can make predictions about how the Earth’s climate can change if different aspects of the system are perturbed.

The third in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Paradoxes of Relativity. Conway will present a simple introduction to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, including its paradoxical consequence that the time order of remotely separated events depends on the observer.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

The second in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Paradox of Kochen and Specker. Conway will present a quantum mechanical prediction, the axiom SPIN, that shows via a simple geometric puzzle that some particle properties cannot exist before they are measured.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.

Over 550 people attended the first lecture in the Public Lecture Series on The Free Will Theorem, presented by John Conway.  The lectures are now available for online viewing here.

UPDATE!! We’ve had several queries about whether the lectures will be available online and generally Princeton tapes and posts lectures like these in about 10 days. We’ve asked them to expedite this lecture taping so it will be available before next Monday’s lecture. Check this site later this week: http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

In a series of lectures, John Conway will discuss his work with Simon Kochen on the “Free Will Theorem,” which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. Starting tonight, these six free lectures will take place on Monday evenings at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s inaugural lecture is Free Will and Determinism in Science and Philosophy. Conway will present on the various philosophical positions on the Free Will problem, and the ways in which first Newtonian physics and then quantum mechanics have affected the question.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.